I have been working on Rails for more than half year and i do file editing with vi at server side most of the time. vi is a great tool but it is not convenient for editing multiple files which is very common in programmer. In the past, I had to close the file, cd to another directory and opened another file for editing.

And last week, Steve told me a vi plugin called NERDTree which acts like a File Explorer in vi and it is written by Marty Grenfell. I have just tried it and it definitely changed my life! Let’s install it first.

1. Download the plugin from the NERDTree website to ~/.vim

2. Unzip the downloaded archive

3. Open vi

4. Enter :helptags ~/.vim/doc

5. Restart vi

Now you can open the NERDTree Explorer by the :NERDTree command.

 

Here are some the useful commands and hotkeys i found in a blog post written by Peteris Krumins and StackOverflow.
COMMANDS

:NERDTree      #Open the NERDTree Explorer
:NERDTreeClose #Close the NERDTree Explorer
:tabp          #Go to previous vi tab
:tabn          #Go to next vi tab
:tabnew        #Open new vi tab

 

HOTKEYS

o       #Open file or directory in the NERDTree Explorer
t       #Open file in new vi tab
i       #Open file in new horizontal split
s       #Open file in new vertical split
p       #Go to parent directory
r       #Refresh current directory
ctrl+ww #Switch between the NERDTree Explorer and File Buffer

 

Done =)

Reference:

• The NERD tree : A tree explorer plugin for navigating the filesystem
• Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part VI: nerd_tree.vim
• StackOverflow – Switching between tabs in NERDTree
• StackOverflow – How to jump back to NERDTree from file in tab?