Wintabs is a per-window buffer manager for Vim. It creates "tabs" for each buffer opened in every Vim window, and displays these buffers either on tabline or statusline. It brings persistent contexts to Vim windows and tabs, making them more awesome.

Wintabs with two native Vim tabs, showing buffers and tabs on tabline:

Wintabs with two Vim windows, showing buffers on statusline. It nicely preserves window layout when switching/closing tabs:

Wintabs manages long tablines nicely (better than Vim does!):

Use your favorite package manager to install:

• Pathogen
  • git clone https://github.com/zefei/vim-wintabs ~/.vim/bundle/vim-wintabs
• Vundle
  • Plugin 'zefei/vim-wintabs'
• NeoBundle
  • NeoBundle 'zefei/vim-wintabs'

By default, wintabs maintains a list of buffers for each buffer opened in each window, and displays them on tabline. To navigate and manage these buffers, a few commands and key mappings are provided, and they are very similar to what Vim buffers/tabs have.

To make full use of wintabs, it is recommended to have the following commands or keys mapped, these are the essential ones:

commands             | mapping keys                 | replacing Vim commands
---------------------+------------------------------+-----------------------
:WintabsNext         | <Plug>(wintabs_next)         | :bn!
:WintabsPrevious     | <Plug>(wintabs_previous)     | :bp!
:WintabsClose        | <Plug>(wintabs_close)        | :bd
:WintabsOnly         | <Plug>(wintabs_only)         |
:WintabsCloseWindow  | <Plug>(wintabs_close_window) | :close, CTRL-W c
:WintabsOnlyWindow   | <Plug>(wintabs_only_window)  | :only, CTRL-W o
:WintabsCloseVimtab  | <Plug>(wintabs_close_vimtab) | :tabclose
:WintabsOnlyVimtab   | <Plug>(wintabs_only_vimtab)  | :tabonly

Below is an example of key mappings:

map <C-H> <Plug>(wintabs_previous)
map <C-L> <Plug>(wintabs_next)
map <C-T>c <Plug>(wintabs_close)
map <C-T>o <Plug>(wintabs_only)
map <C-W>c <Plug>(wintabs_close_window)
map <C-W>o <Plug>(wintabs_only_window)
command! Tabc WintabsCloseVimtab
command! Tabo WintabsOnlyVimtab

See :help wintabs-commands for all available commands and mappings.

Wintabs has a handful of configuration options, see :help wintabs-options for details.

A: Does wintabs support Vim sessions?

Q: Yes, as long as your sessionoptions contains "globals". Wintabs also supports xolox/vim-session out of the box.

MIT License.