Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Resizing Windows

Now that you’re more familiar with Vim’s multiwindowing features, you need a little more control over them. This section addresses how you can change the size of the current window, with, of course, effects on other windows in the screen. Vim provides options to control window sizes and window sizing behavior when opening new windows with split commands.

If you’d rather control window sizes sans commands, use gvim and let the mouse do the work for you. Simply click and drag window boundaries with the mouse to resize. For vertically separated windows, click the mouse on the vertical separator of | characters. Horizontal windows are separated by their status lines.

Window Resize Commands

As you’d expect, Vim has vertical and horizontal resize commands. Like the other window commands, these all begin with CTRL-W and map nicely to mnemonic devices, making them easy to learn and remember.

CTRL-W= tries to resize all windows to equal size. (This is also influenced by the current values of winheight and windwidth, discussed in the following section.) If the available screen real estate doesn’t divide equally, Vim sizes the windows to be as close to equal as possible.

CTRL-W- decreases the current window height by one line. Vim also has an ex command that lets you decrease the window size explicitly. For example, the command resize -4 decreases the current window by four lines and gives those lines to the window below it.

Note

It’s interesting to note that Vim obediently decreases ...