Vim Question Regarding Views

Question

I have been reading a lot of the questions here on vim. I can't locate something that I want to do with vim but I am sure its possible.

I like vim(I am still new at it) using tabs and I have adjusted my vimrc so that H & L keys take me back and forth between tabs.

I was hoping to find a way to be able to use tab commands to open up a tab as output, so that if I am writing something in my case Ruby and I want to test it I could run it and flip to a new tab with the output. Or flip a tab to an interactive console to test code. This is possible?

As an aside is it possible to expand tabs to views so if I had two tabs open say script and output I could :spx or similar and have tabs come to split screen.

Answer 1

I know it's not the answer you want, but use buffers and ditch the tabs. I have a screencast going over how to use splits to manage your window.

http://lococast.net/archives/111

As for the ruby output, that seems like it might be covered here:

http://superuser.com/questions/133886/vim-displaying-code-output-in-a-new-window-a-la-textmate

Answer 2

In answer to your question about opening up a tab as output, I don't think there's any built in way to do this. There's the RunView plugin (see my answers to this question and this one), but I don't think that it supports using a separate tab (it works with a split window: what I think you refer to when you say 'view').

Regarding an interactive console: no, this is not possible. See :help design-not.

As for general use of Vim, try to get used to the idea of buffers and the fact that each 'view' (my term), whether it be a split window, a tab or whatever is just a means of looking at a particular buffer. You can have multiple views on a single buffer, so you can have a source file vertical split with two headers in one tab and the same source file vertically split with another header and a different bit of the same source file in another tab. This is very powerful once you get used to it. The Ctrl-W keyboard shortcuts are your friend (e.g. Ctrl-W, h to go left one window).

As for changing a tab into a split window, I don't think there's a direct way to do this (how would Vim know which tabs you wanted to join?). You can break a split into a tab with Ctrl-W + T, but to go back you'd have to create a couple of mappings. This is off the top of my head but something like this might work:

command! TakeThis let takebufnr = bufnr("")<CR>
command! SplitTaken exe 'split #' . takebufnr<CR>
nmap ,t :TakeThis<CR>
nmap ,s :SplitTaken<CR>

Then press ,t on the buffer you want to grab and ,s on the one you want to split with the 'taken' buffer.

Answer 3

You can load the ruby output into a vim window in a couple of ways. One way would be to open a new split window and then load output of command:

" vimscript command to open new split window
wincmd n
" run ruby command and insert output at line 1
1,1!ruby foo.rb

alternatively you could get view the output on a new tab with a single window:

tabnew
1,1!ruby foo.rb