BetterTabs allows you to keep the a separation between tabs in Vim: Each buffer stays on the tab it was open in. This way you can keep one project per tab and don't find buffers switching from a tab to another breaking your workflow.

Important note This plugin is still in development, it might then contains different bugs or unwanted behavior. If you find one please create a new issue.

I created this plugin because I had to work on different projects with gVim on a Windows OS. To do that in a terminal version of Vim I usually use different instances of Vim open on several tmux terminal.

Unfortunately switching between several instances of gVim on a graphical OS feels pretty inconvenient to me. So I created one tab per project, but I was bothered by the fact that a buffer open in a tab could be accessed in any other tab.

So I created this plugin it simply allows you to keep every buffer in the tab it was open in.

BetterTabs should be compatible with most of the plugin managers. I'd recommand using Vim-Plug: simply add the following line to your .vimrc:

Plug 'statox/betterTabs.vim'

Save your .vimrc, execute PlugInstall and voilà!

The plugin is entirely in vimscript, it doesn't need any dependencies.

This plugin uses autocommands when a new buffer is created so the user doesn't have to worry about how they're handled. Simply open tabs as you usually do and use your prefered way to open a buffer.

Once a buffer is open in a tab it can't be accessed from another tab. To switch between tabs the user can use tabnext and tabprevious as usual.

To switch between the buffers of a tab use the commands :NextBuf and :PrevBuf.

The plugin also defines the following mappings:

nnoremap <Leader>h :PrevBuf<CR>
nnoremap <Leader>l :NextBuf<CR>

You can then use <Leader>h and <Leader>l to switch between the buffers.

To keep the behavior of this plugin consistent, users shouldn't use bdelete but the command :CloseBuf.

The following mapping is also defined:

nnoremap <Leader>bc :CloseBuf<CR>

So the user can use <Leader>bc to close a buffer.

To keep the behavior of this plugin consistent, users shouldn't use tabclose but the command :CloseTab.

The command :ListBuf allows you to see the different tabs open and the buffers contained in the tabs.

You can also use F2 to print the list thanks to the following mapping:

nnoremap <F2> :ListBuf<CR>

It is possible to disable the default mappings to override them, simply add the following line to your .vimrc:

let g:betterTabsVim_map_keys = 0