I'm making tentative steps into using tabs in Vim. It seems a bit ridiculous, I've been using tabs in everything for the last 18 years: * Visual Studio * Every browser since Opera came up with them * Notepad++ * Sublime Text * Bash terminals As you can see it's mostly Windows, but I really want to switch to proper free and open tools for my dev work, so I want to switch off Sublime Text into Vim. I've also been a fairly basic user of Vim for 18 years. I only just realised that Vim does have tabs in it! Don't I feel clever... So ok, great so Vim has tabs, but really they're not tabs, but they are, but they're not. The Vim wiki on [tab 'pages'][1] has a mildly helpful start: > In Vim, each file is loaded into a buffer, which can be displayed in any number of windows, in any number of tabs. I can just about get that, they're really flexible, which I can imagine is great. You could split a single file across tabs I'd imagine, I've never felt the need to do that, but I'm sure there's a use case for it. But then the wiki falls off the edge of my knowledge whilst at the same time trying to claim they're making it easier for me: > The easiest way to think about tab pages in Vim is to consider them to be viewports, layouts, or workspaces. ### My question: Ok... so as it's so easy could someone explain to me what the following are in terms of Vim: * viewport * layout * workspace --- P.S. I've been found a helpful answer on this SO question on [Using Vim's tabs like buffers][2]: > 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. But again that doesn't explain what a viewport is, or a layout or a workspace. None of which I've heard of in terms of an editor before. (Well actually Sublime Text has workspaces but I'm sure they mean something different there) Yes, I could keep googling down the rabbit hole, but I didn't expect the rabbit hole to be this deep. [1]: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_tab_pages [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8973705/327074