How to show a terminal under all tabs?

Question

I have opened few files in tab

  vim -p file1 file2 file3

When i have opened a tab contains file1, I open a terminal

:botright terminal

But this terminal is only available for file1 . when I open other tabs file2 and file 3 , the terminal is not shown under. Is there a way to show a terminal under all tabs? (like vscode where terminal is static and we can move between tabs)

Answer 1

Sadly, no, it is not possible.

If you look at :help windows-intro, the following (among other) is said:

   A buffer is the in-memory text of a file.                                                                                                                                                                       
   A window is a viewport on a buffer.                                                                                                                                                                             
   A tab page is a collection of windows.

There is some hierarchy here between the windows and tabs.

So, to take your view, which (I think) looks like that:

The terminal is in a window and it belongs to the first tab (where foo is currently open).

So having the terminal being independent of the tabs would mean to have a window independent of the tabs, which goes against the above hierarchy.

Answer 2

Is there a reason you open each file in a different tab with -p? The standard way to open multiple files is to open them in different buffers. See this answer for more about buffers vs windows vs tabs.

You can cycle through the buffer displayed in the top window with :bnext and similar. The workflow I would suggest to achieve what you want would be something like:

1. Open the files you want with vim file1 file2 file3

2. Open a new terminal below with :terminal

3. After doing what you want in the terminal, switch to the top window with Ctrl-W k

4. Make some edits, cycle to the next file with :bnext etc whilst keeping the terminal visible below.