How did I live without vim's wildmenu all these years?
Even after years of extensive usage, vim will surprise
you eventually. Like today: I had a feeling that the way of switching buffers
that I use (:b abc<Tab>, where 'abc' is a fragment of a file's name) may not
be the most convenient one. I used the BufExplorer plugin for some months,
but found it too bloated.
Then I stumbled upon vim's builtin wildmenu function, which really knocked me
off of my feet! How was it possible that I didn't discover it earlier?
Simply put the following line in your .vimrc:
set wildmenu
Then open a bunch of files, and try
:b <Tab>
to get a horizontal list of buffer names that you can navigate and select interactively. The improved Tab completion works for all commands, e.g.
:e <Tab>
will open a minimalistic file explorer for the current directory. Wowee!