Tabbed editing with ViM 7.0

Yesterday I compiled Vim 7.0 on my FreeBSD box and started playing with the new features for a while. The new release of Vim provides some new features that make editing your code with Vim even more easy and powerful.

I like tabs. I use them in Firefox, Gnome's Terminal and in general, everywhere possible. I don't think tabbed editing was possible in Vim with versions prior to 7.0, what wasn't a problem at all, because Vim provides a bunch of possibilities to editing multiple files at one time, for example using :split and <CTRL-W-W>.

However, using tabs seems to be an intuitive approach to me, so here's a very short overview on how to use them with Vim 7.0:

For a more detailed introduction to the new tabbing feature and the complete list of commands and shortcuts, take a look at the tabpage documentation.

Using tabs in Vim couldn't be any easier. In order to make Vim obey my personal preferences on shortcuts, I mapped my keys like this in my $HOME/.vimrc:

map <C-T>     :tabnew<CR>
map <C-Right> :tabnext<CR>
map <C-Left>  :tabprevious<CR>

Vim's tabs are now usable in the same way that I configured Gnome's terminal and Mozilla Firefox.