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Alternative tab navigation

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Please review this tip:

This page is dodgy. The contents may not be useful for Vim 7. If you think this tip is useful, please edit it to make the problem and its solution more understandable, and remove the {{Dodgy}} tag.

Remaps existing useful functionality, and there are way to many comments to wade through. Needs severe cleanup before being useful. Some of the mappings may be fairly useful and provide familiar keybindings to navigate through tabs...but do they really warrant an entire tip?

Tip 1221 Previous Next created May 8, 2006 · complexity basic · author Kim Schulz aka KimuSan · version n/a

Here is an alternative way to open and navigate tabs in Vim 7. Add the following to your vimrc: 

" tab navigation like firefox
:nmap <C-S-tab> :tabprevious<CR>
:nmap <C-tab> :tabnext<CR>
:map <C-S-tab> :tabprevious<CR>
:map <C-tab> :tabnext<CR>
:imap <C-S-tab> <Esc>:tabprevious<CR>i
:imap <C-tab> <Esc>:tabnext<CR>i
:nmap <C-t> :tabnew<CR>
:imap <C-t> <Esc>:tabnew<CR>

You can open a new tab with ctrl-t, go forward through the tabs with ctrl-tab and backwards with ctrl-shift-tab.

This way of navigating resembles the way it is done in Firefox.

[edit] Comments

I ended up with: 

map th :tabnext<CR>
map tl :tabprev<CR>
map tn :tabnew<CR>
map td :tabclose<CR>

For something like gnome-terminal tab-related key shortcuts: 

:nmap <C-S-t> :tabnew<CR>
:imap <C-S-t> <Esc>:tabnew<CR>
:imap <C-S-w> <Esc>:tabclose<CR>

Didn't exactly work in Windows' gvim. Had to put it into _gvimrc, like this: 

:map <C-S-tab> :tabprevious<CR>
:map <C-tab> :tabnext<CR>
:map <C-t> :tabnew<CR>

Why not add Ctrl-w to close tabs? 

:map <C-w> :tabclose<CR>

I just use the way that Vim provides and it work well:

  • gt for tabnext
  • gT for tabprevious

Try 

:map <S-h> gT
:map <S-l> gt

That way you can hold down the shift key while you scroll left and right through the tabs with 'h' and 'l'.

<C-tab> , <C-S-tab> don't work on Eterm, aterm, xterm

We can use <C-PageDown> and <C-PageUp> instead of <C-tab> and <C-S-tab> This's the default way in Vim 7. By the way, this also work on Firefox.

This tip is really good. But the key sequences used for switching/creating the tabs is clashing with other features of Vim. For example:

  • CTRL+T is used for jumping to previous tags [exuberant ctags].
  • CTRL+W is used for jumping to next split window in multiple windows
  • CTRL+TAB is captured by KDE itself to switch workspaces.

Can you give a nice key combinations which will work with all these features ?. I know tabs is a new feature of vim7. But this script can become awesome if worked properly on.

Vim 7 already has <C-PageUp> and <C-PageDown> to cycle through tabs. To open and close them I added 

nmap <C-Insert> :tabnew<CR>
nmap <C-Delete> :tabclose<CR>

(not for insert or visual mode because they do something else then).

I know that Z and X both perform functions in normal mode, but I never use them, so I just mapped: 

:nmap Z :tabprev<CR>
:nmap X :tabnext<CR>

That way shift-z and shift-x takes me forward and backward. It's a lazy, ergonimic one hand solution.

I found this tip 

autocmd VimEnter * tab all
autocmd BufAdd * exe 'tablast | tabe "' . expand( "<afile") .'"'

I neglected to RTFM. The key combination is <tab number>gt. Here's a handy alternative to switch to tab-N by pressing Alt-FN 

map <A-F1> 1gt
map <A-F2> 2gt
map <A-F3> 3gt
map <A-F4> 4gt
map <A-F5> 5gt
map <A-F6> 6gt
map <A-F7> 7gt
map <A-F8> 8gt
map <A-F9> 9gt
map <A-F0> 10g
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