I sometimes hang out on the #vim channel on Freenode, where use of tab pages is often discouraged in favor of efficient use of the buffer/argument lists, split windows, and the 'hidden' option.
Personally, I prefer using tab pages in many circumstances, but have never really had any specific advantages or features of tab pages that I can bring up to support my preference. On the Vim Tips Wiki, we have in the category description of http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Tabs an indication that the category contains tips that "exploit Vim's tab page design to do clever things you can't do in other editors", but there are very few tips in this category that actually offer this. I'm sure there are clever ideas out there that leverage the power of tab pages in Vim, that are difficult or impossible to accomplish otherwise. I'd like to add some of these ideas to the Tabs category on the wiki. Please add these ideas to the wiki directly, or respond to this thread. You don't need to make the tip perfect before adding it, there are other editors that can improve on your work. At the moment, I'd just like to get a few tips out there! If I see a lot of wiki submissions without much discussion in the thread, I'll probably post links to the new tips or collect a list somewhere on the wiki. Here are a couple of simple ideas. Some of these are probably not worth a tip on their own, but perhaps may make a nice "quick tips" list: * Opening a diff window for a buffer that you are also editing in another tab, without messing up window layout or options set by :diffthis * Opening a full-screen window on a buffer without messing up buffer layout or messing with :mkview/:mksession * Running a command on a limited selection of buffers without using the argument list (see http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Fritzophrenic/Repeat_a_command_on_a_selection_of_buffers for some notes on this and a potentially acceptable tip stub) If you don't like the idea of using tab pages, this is not the thread to say so. We all know that Vim tabs don't act like the tabs in other editors. I'm starting this thread to find some good reasons why this is so. Criticism of specific ideas or a brief discussion of alternative methods is fine. Let's get the ideas flowing! Ben Fritz (fritzophrenic) _______________________________________________ Vim-l mailing list Vim-l@wikia.com http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/vim-l
