Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 39

Manage Hidden Files

When a buffer has been modified, Vim gives it special treatment to ensure that we don’t accidentally quit the editor without saving our changes. Find out how to hide a modified buffer and how to handle hidden buffers when quitting Vim.

Run these commands in the shell to launch Vim:

$ cd code/files
$ ls
a.txt     b.txt
$ vim *.txt
2 files to edit

Let’s make a change to a.txt. We’ll just press Go to append a blank line at the end of the buffer. Without saving the changes, let’s examine the buffer list:

:ls
1 %a + "a.txt"                        line 1
2      "b.txt"                        line 0

The buffer representing a.txt is annotated with a + sign, which indicates that it has been modified. If we were to save the file now, the contents ...