Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 44

Explore the File System with netrw

In addition to letting us view (and edit) the contents of a file, Vim also lets us view the contents of a directory. The netrw plugin, included in the Vim distribution, allows us to explore the file system.

Preparation

The functionality described in this tip is not implemented in Vim’s core source code but in a plugin called netrw. This plugin comes as standard with the Vim distribution, so we don’t have to install anything, but we do need to make sure that Vim is configured to load plugins. These lines of configuration are the minimum requirement for your vimrc file:

essential.vim

set nocompatible
filetype plugin on

Meet netrw—Vim’s Native File Explorer

If we launch Vim with the path to a directory ...