📅 2014-Sep-18 ⬩ ✍️ Ashwin Nanjappa ⬩ 🏷️ file explorer, ranger, vim ⬩ 📚 Archive
Vim has an internal file explorer called NetRW. Another popular choice of file explorer for Vim is the NERDTree plugin. Recently, I started to use Ranger as my file explorer at the shell. I could open text files in it using Vim easily. However, what I really wished was to use Ranger from inside Vim as a file explorer.
Using Ranger inside Vim allows me to keep a Vim session with many files open and fall down to Ranger to explore and manipulate files and jump back into my Vim session. Another big advantage is that the files I open using Ranger all persist as buffers in the Vim session. That is, if I am working on File1, I jump to Ranger to find File2 and open it, then it should open back in the same Vim session, so that I now have File1 and File2 open. Thankfully, all of this is possible easily! 😊
To use Ranger as a file explorer for Vim, all you need to is add this code to your Vimrc. You can then launch Ranger whenever you want by pressing your leader key and r
. That is, usually it is \r
.
Tried with: Ranger 1.6.1, Vim 7.4 and Ubuntu 14.04