Vim File Navigation

Recently there has been some renewed interest in my series of posts on using Vim for C# development, so I thought I should add a few more posts to the series to bring it up to date.

You can find the introduction to this series here.

In a previous post I talked about how to open and edit files in Vim.  That post discusses just the basics of opening files.  Since then I've started using the wonderful NERDTree plugin.  This plugin opens a small buffer on the left of your Vim window which contains the file system tree.  You can then navigate through directories and open files.  The nifty part is the NERDTree is just a Vim buffer, so you can navigate with h,j,k,l and you can search with / etc.  To see what I'm talking about, you can watch a demo of the NERDTree in action here.

Before I go on I should mention that Vim actually has a built in file system navigation plugin called Netrw.  NERDTree adds a few features and is in someways a bit easier to use, but Netrw is capable of doing all of this stuff and it's built right into Vim.

Using NERDTree has completely changed the way I work in Vim.  When I'm ready to start working, I navigate to my .sln directory in the terminal and I type

gvim .

This opens Vim with NERDTree showing the contents of the current directory.  From here you can navigate around and find the file you want to start editing.

When you open the first file NERDTree will go away.  If you want to pull up NERDTree so it's always visible docked to the left of your Vim window you can type

:NERDTree

To toggle it open and closed you use

:NERDToggle

That's kind of a lot to type. So to shorten it up I've mapped it to F2 by adding this to my vimrc:

" toggles NERDTree on and off
map <f2> :NERDTreeToggle<cr>
imap <f2> <esc>:NERDTreeToggle<cr>i

Now hitting F2 will open and close the NERDTree. Fast and easy.

So NERDTree is great for finding and opening files (you can even open files in splits with i for horizontal and s for vertical), but NERDTree can also manipulate the file system.

For example, to add a new file, put your cursor over (or in) the directory you want to add the file to and hit the "m" key.  This will open up a menu with some options.  Type a to "add a childnode" and then just type in the name of the file. This works for creating directories too.  You can also move (and rename) files as well as delete.