Tab to view files in directly?

Question

Is it possible to press tab or some other operator to view the available files in a given directory path? For example:

For example, in the unix shell I can do something like [tab] to get:

After trial-and-erring a bit, it seems like :e is the command I want to use instead of :o ? Is :e basically like "open with tab-complete" ?

Answer 1

Open mode (from the :open command) is a bit of a legacy command:

                            *:o* *:op* *:open*
:[range]o[pen]          Works like |:visual|: end Ex mode.
                {Vi: start editing in open mode}

:[range]o[pen] /pattern/    As above, additionally move the cursor to the
                column where "pattern" matches in the cursor
                line.

Vim does not support open mode, since it's not really useful.  For those
situations where ":open" would start open mode Vim will leave Ex mode, which
allows executing the same commands, but updates the whole screen instead of
only one line.

You want to use :edit instead to, well, edit a file. By default, you should be able to use :help cmdline-completion, including tab, to complete filenames. This works for :split, :vsplit , and :tabedit, too, as these are the standard "edit a file" commands.