Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 38

Group Buffers into a Collection with the Argument List

The argument list is easily managed and can be useful for grouping together a collection of files for easy navigation. We can run an Ex command on each item in the argument list using the :argdo command.

Let’s start by opening a handful of files in Vim:

$ cd code/files/letters
$ vim *.txt
5 files to edit

In Tip 37, we saw that the :ls command provides a listing of buffers. Now let’s examine the argument list:

:args
[a.txt] b.txt c.txt. d.txt e.txt

The argument list represents the list of files that was passed as an argument when we ran the vim command. In our case, we provided a single argument, *.txt, but our shell expanded the * wildcard, matching the ...