Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Vim – Navigating files in vertical splits

Posted 12 March 2012 @ 11am in vim

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The two most useful native vim mappings for navigation are arguably

(go to file, use it over any reference to a file, such as a Rails partial), and

(go to tag, use it over any class or function name). But one problem in vim is that by doing these commands, you lose your previous place. Sure it’s easy to go back to with Ctrl-O or similar, but I find it much more useful to open the new location in a split, as you are usually exploring them while retaining the current context. Here are two mappings that do that for you:

If you like these, you might want to check out my Yet Another Dotfile Repo project, which includes these and more!

At least for go to tag (CTRL-]) I believe you can use the Jump to older entry in the tag stack (CTRL-T) command to traverse back up the stack

There are builtin bindings for those things, if you don’t mind a horizontal split instead of vertical. The nice thing about builtins is that they work anywhere.

CTRL-W ] – Splits current window, jumps to tag under cursor
CTRL-W f – Splits current window, edits file name under cursor

There’s a couple more variations that you can see at :help window-tag

great mappings! throw them up on http://vimbits.com/ too… that crowd will appreciate them

@Jarrod cool site! didn’t know about vimbits – thanks

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I’m a bit of a noob when it comes to ctags, so it took me a while to figure out that you need to generate the tags file for your project before this will work. With:

ctags -R *

If I’ve got that wrong, please correct me.

If you’re a rails dev, use rails.vim and :Rtags command, which does this:

:!ctags -f /path/to/tmp/tags -R –langmap=”ruby:+.rake.builder.rjs” –languages=-javascript /path/to/your/project

@paul – Yes there are built in bindings, but they are no good. Having to hit two keys in a row, one of them being a chord? What is this emacs? :) Also, they split horizontally which is not as useful on modern wide screens. I love vim but it has some bad ux in places, and having more useable keybindings is very valuable to me. Also if you keep your dotfiles portable on github, your setup can work anywhere.

Christian Brabandt on the vim mailing list was kind enough to make me a patch to make all split commands open vertically by default:

http://groups.google.com/d/topic/vim_dev/CaMmJW3y7K4/discussion

@Kartik oh that’s really cool, I’ll take a look thanks

I tried your ,F mapping but it gave me an error in vim:
Invalid expression: expand(“”):vsp:wincmd w:exec(“tag “. word)

Doh stupid blog formatting software! Fixing…

All fixed up. See also https://gist.github.com/2031016

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