Re: Regarding NETRW and the buffer list

On 20/10/12 02:13, Ken L wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm a Vim new user, so please forgive my ignorance, but when using NETRW, is it possible to prevent it from displaying filepaths in the buffer list (:ls)? My list quickly becomes cluttered with these path names, and I'd rather have it display currently open buffers only.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Ken
>

There are two commands for this kind of job: :bdelete and :bwipeout
(which can be abbreviated by removing any number of characters from the
end, except the first two after the colon).

:bdelete keeps the buffer name in memory, but :ls won't show it unless
you use :ls! with exclamation.

:bwipeout really forgets everything that Vim knew about the buffer.
Including what you would have liked to remember later!

In no case, however, are buffer numbers reallocated: if you use :bd or
:bw, the corresponding buffer number will be "missing" from the output
of :ls until you quit Vim.

See:
:help :bd
:help :bw
:help :ls

The purpose of :ls displaying even buffers not currently shown in a
window is because you may have something important to do about them. For
instance, starting Vim as

vim file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

will start Vim will three files, but only one of them will be displayed
in a window. The other two are available though, and :next will cycle
through them (except that you will have to save a modified file first,
or confirm its discard).

All those buffers are "open" in a sense, even those that aren't
displayed in a window at the moment. Here is perhaps the place for a
little boilerplate about Vim terminology:

Vim has one or more buffers. Each buffer usually represents one file,
but it may be a file which doesn't yet exist on disk, or even a file
which will never be written to disk. A buffer can also be empty. It can
even be a placeholder for some data which will be fetched from disk
(from a known disk path) the next time you want it displayed in a window.

Each buffer is displayed in zero or more windows. A window is a kind of
viewport on a buffer; depending on the respective sizes of both, the
window may contain all or part of the buffer, or even (for a small
buffer) all the buffer with some empty space left over at the bottom.
Editing a file normally consists of making changes to the buffer
displayed in the current window; these changes may then be written to
disk — or discarded.

Vim has one or more tab pages; one and only one of them is visible at
any time; if there are others, they usually have tab labels near the top
of the Vim screen (in gvim, below the menu and toolbar). Each tab page
contains one or more windows. If there are several windows in a single
tab page, they may be split vertically, horizontally, or in any combination.

What is called "a window" in Vim language is not the same as what your
OS calls "a window". Every running instance of Vim handles one and only
one "OS window" but there may be any number of "Vim (split) windows" in
it (well, no fewer than one, and the upper limit depends on the
available memory on your computer). (An exception to this may be MacVim:
on the Mac, I think I've heard about the possibility of having a single
running instance of MacVim handle several "windows" in the OS sense, but
I'm not sure of the details — or maybe I misunderstood: I'm on Linux.)


See
:help windows.txt
:help tabpage.txt


Best regards,
Tony.
--
unix soit qui mal y pense

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