File Tabs and Tree in vim

Question

I read this topic on how to open multiple files and edit.

But there was a demo I saw where the user had multiple files open and showing as tabs in vim. How can I get that too ?

Also, there was a tree view like in other GUI editors.

I am using the default vim on macOS Mojave.

Answer 1

1. There are many commands in Vim. And I mean it. Some randomly popping in my mind are :tabedit, :tab all and Ctrl-WT. But I see no reason to re-tell here all that info from the standard docs you can read in :h windows.txt, :h tabpage.txt and such. I'm sure you can find what you need yourself.

2. The only "true" GUI tree widget I'm aware of, is Neovim-qt built-in (:GuiTreeviewToggle to toggle it). Otherwise it's a buffer emulating filesystem view suitable for both GUI and console. Such functionality usually provided by a dedicated plugin. There's one shipped with Vim installation (netrw), and also a few others you can download and install manually (the most popular is possibly NERDTree).

Answer 2

Vim does not create tabs for each buffer by defaul. What you saw is most probably the airline plugin, with a bit of configuration for the tabline.

Here's the minimum to get the airline's tabline:

let g:airline#extensions#tabline#enabled = 1

Answer 3

I was looking for this couple of days ago. You can open an explorer typing: :Lexplore (Check this answer to learn the different ways to open a file). It is related with the netrw option that Matt mentioned. For tabs, you can check this post, it explains most of the commands for tabs with vim.