A quick pointer to a really useful series of Vim articles by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier that also appear on Linux.com.

Well-heeled Vim users will no doubt see the following as being pretty obvious. For anyone else like me fumbling around with Vim to the point of giving up, I hope this at least saves you the time I spent until the small hours of the morning!

The way I used to think

Coming from working with text editors like jEdit which, like others, has a file browser in a split pane, I had been trying to reproduce this in Vim.

However, since upgrading to Vim 7, this had been causing irritations, like this routine to open a file:

• Select a file in the left pane.
• Click in a window in the right pane to indicate that was the one to open it in.
• Go back to the file in the left pane and Shift-p to open it.

Forgetting to select the window to open it in meant it would open in the left pane instead, which was supposed to be my file browsing pane.

Not only that but for whatever reason I was getting an odd refresh when I moved to another application and back to Vim. This refresh was annoying enough to have me spend time reinstalling netrw, attempting to compile Vim for myself (which failed) and even taking time to try out Textmate.

All in all I was getting pretty fed up and was even converting the Euro to Aussie Dollar to see if I had enough pocket money to buy Textmate. Luckily, the stubbornness of anyone who has put the time into learning Vim wouldn’t go away and I stopped to have a look at the new tabs in Vim 7. It was then that I realised I’d been thinking about this all wrong…

Vim is about modes

My mistake was to think of any window in Vim as having a specific role and ignoring vim’s modal nature. I realised that file browsing was always there in the background as I edited a file and I didn’t need to have windows specifically assigned to file browsing.

The joy of :Ex (very poor, I know!)

The magic lies in the fact that the file browsing functionality of netrw is following you around as you go. For example, if I open …/Sites/zend_framework/library/Zend.php in a window…

…and then hit :Ex I will be in that files directory…

However, if I open a file from another directory in another window hitting :Ex for that window will bring up it’s directory. This then allows me to have a contextual file browser available at any time without having to move my hands from the keyboard.

Admittedly this is not exactly a nirvana attaining moment of enlightenment, but it’s certainly one of those “Aha!” moments that reinforces your faith in your tools and the time spent learning them.

Further Reading

Beginner’s guide to Vi Improved (vim)