opening files in Vim

[brock]

Now that I've got my new Vim icon set up, I've got a new problem.  I've been doing the Vimtutor and reading up on it and it says that to open an existing document with Vim, type

Code:

Vim 'nameofdocument'

But when I do that, type in a name of an existing document on my system, vim opens up blank, with the title on the bottom, like it just opened up a new file named "whateverInamedit".  So I was wondering, since the directions don't seem to work, do we have a different way of opening files with Vim with Vector?  I thought maybe we might have "VectorVim" or something?

[toothandnail]

Are you in the same directory as the document, or are you entering the full path to the document if you are not in its directory?

paul.

[rbistolfi]

As kidd and Epic_Fail_Guy are not much around lately, the bad but enthusiastic discipuli will get in.
You can open a file with : o, (those smileys are not vim friendly, forget the space between : and o) but in my experience it will not let you do tab-completion. Instead, you can use the edit command, :e which will let you complete the path with <tab>.
Also, I took this one from the vim tips plugin and I put it in my .vimrc:

Code:

"   Edit another file in the same directory as the current file
"   uses expression to extract path from current file's path
"  (thanks Douglas Potts)
if has("unix")
    map ,e :e <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR>
else
    map ,e :e <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "\" <CR>
endif

That will let you open a file from the last used path with ,e in normal mode.

HTH

[brock]

If I go into the directory with bash, and then 'vim name' it works.  Is that the only way to do this? 

[kidd]

if you want to open a file with vim from the console, you can

Code:

vim file

if the file does not exist, vim will open it anyways, and create when you do the first :w

if you want to open a file not in the `pwd` you're in bash, you have to type the full path

Code:

vim /tmp/file.c

inside vim, :e is the command to open files, and it will start from the directory you opened vim.  If you opened it from the console, probably it'll be your $HOME dir.

type :pwd  to find out where vim will first look at.

inside vim, you can type absolute paths, like :e /tmp/file.c

Depending on your vim options (@compile time), you should be able to 'edit' a directory.   Then it'll list you all files there, and you can edit whatever is there.

more info in :help edit-a-file

:help  has tons of info. the first 'user manual' sections are really useful as well as first reference manual sections.

HTH

kidd

[Triarius Fidelis]

I prefer to type ':split' in Ex mode and use tab completion to find the file. That feature should be enabled automatically if ':set compatible?' says 'nocompatible', id est Vim acts like Vim, not vi