Vimcasts

How to use tabs

Vim’s treatment of tabs is a little different than what you might be used to if you are coming from another editor. In this episode I demonstrate how Vim’s tabs can be used to group split windows together. I also show how to use Vim’s tabs like projects in TextMate, by setting a different working directory for each one.

You can reveal the current directory with the command:

:pwd

To change the working directory for the current tab, use the command:

:cd

Note that both :pwd and :cd commands are native to Vim. You can call the equivalent commands for your shell by running :!pwd or :!cd.

Further reading

• :help tabpage.txt
• :help current-directory
• Using vim’s tabs like buffers