To switch from vertical split to horizontal split fast in Vim

Question

How can you switch your to current windows from horizontal split to vertical split and vice versa in Vim?

I did that a moment ago by accident but I cannot find the key again.

Answer 1

If you have two windows open, you can quit one of them with :q.

Looking in /usr/share/vim/vim72/doc/index.txt.gz I only find a reference to

|CTRL-W_v| CTRL-W v
split current window vertically, new window N lines wide

but no corresponding horizontal split.

Answer 2

Vim mailing list says:

To change two vertically split windows to horizonally split

    ^Wt^WK

Horizontally to vertically:

    ^Wt^WH

where ^W means "hit Ctrl-W". Explanations:

    ^Wt     makes the first (topleft) window current
    ^WK     moves the current window to full-width at the very top
    ^WH     moves the current window to full-height at far left

Note that the t is lowercase, and the K and H are uppercase.

Also, with only two windows, it seems like you can drop the ^Wt part because if you're already in one of only two windows, what's the point of making it current?

Answer 3

In VIM, take a look at the following to see different alternatives for what you might have done:

:help opening-window

For instance:

Ctrl-W s
Ctrl-W o
Ctrl-W v
Ctrl-W o
Ctrl-W s
...