When we open vim with multiple files they will be in their own buffers. If we
open a new file with :e for example, it will be in a new buffer and that’s
good, but there is one extra with vim arguments. We have a list as arguments and
we can do operations on them. Does not matter how many files we have open, the
args list will not change if we don’t explicitly tell vim to do that.
For now, we learn how to navigate between them. With :args we can list our
args list and the active element will be marked with [], for example here
we have 3 files in the args list and Dockerfile is the active entry. It does
not mean Dockerfile is the active buffer, it means a pointer tells us we are
on that position in the args list.
:args
config.yaml [Dockerfile] Makefile
With :n[ext]), we can jump to the next file. It will load the buffer into
the active window. With the same logic we have :prev[ious], which obviously
goes backwards in the args list. Important to note, it does not fold back to
itself, it’s not a ring, it’s a simple list. If we are on the last entry of the
args list and we try to use :n[ext], vim will tell you “Cannot go beyond
last file”.
There is one extra command that can be useful and that’s the :wn[ext]
command. It saves the current file and jumps to the next, same works with
:wp[revious]. It can be very useful if we want to do some operations on more
than one files, but it can’t be solved with other external tools like sed. We
can issue our commands, then we can end with :wn and we can work on the next
file, repeat until we reach the end of the args list.
It’s important to understand how it works, because tomorrow we will use the
args list to do some fancy magic.