Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 41

Organize Your Window Layouts with Tab Pages

Vim’s tabbed interface is different from that of many other text editors. We can use tab pages to organize split windows into a collection of workspaces.

In Vim, a tab page is a container that can hold a collection of windows (tabpageⓘ). If you’re accustomed to using another text editor, then Vim’s tabbed interface might seem strange at first. Let’s begin by considering how tabs work in many other text editors and IDEs.

The classic graphical user interface (GUI) for a text editor features a main workspace for editing files and a sidebar that shows the directory tree of the current project. If we click on a file in the sidebar, it opens a new tab in the main workspace for the specified file. ...