Wiki: Mini Buf Expl

Several modern GUI editors list your open buffers as tabs along one edge of your edit window (VisualStudio, DreamWeaver, EditPlus and UltraEdit come to mind), now we have this feature in VIM! You can checkout a screenshot here: http://www.wavell.net/vim/vim_screenshot.gif.

You can quickly switch buffers by clicking the appropriate "tab". If you don't want to use the mouse just put the cursor on the "tab" and press enter. As you open and close buffers the tabs get updated automatically.

Buffers that are modified get visually marked and buffers that are open in a window get visually marked. The MBE window opens automatically when you open more than one eligible buffer -- no need to open the explorer if you’re only editing one file. MBE doesn't bother showing non-modifiable or hidden buffers.

You can delete buffers by selecting them and pressing d on the keyboard.

http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=159

This script has a good sane set of default settings. In addition it provides many optional features:

• Horizontal or Vertical window with the tabs
• The tab window can auto-size or be set to a range (fixed sizes)
• Key bindings can be turned on that allow for simple window and buffer navigation
• By default you need to double click on tabs to open them, you can switch to using single clicks if you prefer
• You can configure at what point the tab window is open. Default it will be opened when there are more than one eligible buffer and will close if you go below that. However if you prefer to only show the window when 4 eligible buffers are open, that's an easy .vimrc setting.
• It's easy to setup highlighting rules so that active, modified and other buffers are displayed with different foreground and background colors

If you are having problems, there is an extensive debugging system built into the script.

The script and its configuration are completely documented in the .vim file.