Vim: Redefine a command

Question

In vim, in my .vimrc, how can I redefine a command (i.e. :e) as something else? I want to redefine :e * as :tabe *.

Answer 1

As I understand it, you can't. User defined commands must have an uppercase first letter.

  :help :command

for more information

Answer 2

I figured out a way to do it. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1787127/how-to-disable-a-built-in-command-in-vim/1787963#1787963 . From that, we can see that we can use cabbrev to change what a command does. For my needs, cabbrev e tabe is perfect.

But we can generalize this solution to make commands starting with lower case characters accessible to users for user-defined ones: use cabbrev to (re)define a built-in command as a user-defined one. As such, we are able to redefine built-in commands as well as user-defined ones.

Here's an example, which is equivalent to my aforementioned solution to my problem:

:command -nargs=+ E :tabe "<args>"
:cabbrev e E

That's all.