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A small heads-up

Since developing this plugin, I've also developed buffer-tree-explorer. I personally prefer buffer-tree-explorer, as it's just more usable (by its nature). Check it out if you're interested!

buffer-tree

A vim-plugin for rendering your buffer-list as an ascii-tree, written entirely in Vimscript.

The image on the right shows how the buffer-tree behaves when g:buffertree_compress=1 and the BufferTreeFile highlight group is set to yellow.

Why?

I am a fan of both vmux and vim-obsession, so I often have a lot of vim-buffers open at once. Sometimes it can be hard to parse where all of my buffers are using the :buffers command because the buffers are often listed in an inconvenient order, and the paths are quite long. As an example:

:buffers
  1  h   "~/.config/nvim/init.vim"      line 234
 22  h   "~/.config/nvim/demo.txt"      line 1
 23  h   "plugin/tree.py"               line 27
 25  h   "~/.config/nvim/autoload/plug.vim" line 563
 27 #h   "plugin/buffer-tree.vim"       line 91
 28 %a   "README.md"                    line 35

BufferTree lets you view your vim-buffers in an ascii-tree format instead.

:BufferTree
└─ home
   └─ el
      ├─ personal
      │  └─ vim
      │     └─ buffer-tree
      │        ├─ README.md ⇒ 28
      │        └─ plugin
      │           ├─ tree.py ⇒ 23
      │           └─ buffer-tree.vim ⇒ 27
      └─ .config
         └─ nvim
            ├─ demo.txt ⇒ 22
            ├─ autoload
            │  └─ plug.vim ⇒ 25
            └─ init.vim ⇒ 1

Note that the numbers after the arrow next to each file represent the buffer numbers of each file.

Installation

Add this line to your init.vim / .vimrc file:

Plug 'el-iot/buffer-tree.vim'

then source the file and run PlugInstall (though you may need to modify it slightly if you use a different plugin manager).

Usage

All you need is the BufferTree command.

Configuration

Compressing the BufferTree

Sometimes your buffers will be very sparse and the buffer-tree will look a little large for so few files. As an example,

└─ home
   └─ el
      ├─ personal
      │  ├─ vim
      │  │  └─ buffer-tree
      │  │     ├─ README.md ⇒ 2
      │  │     └─ plugin
      │  │        └─ buffer-tree.vim ⇒ 3
      │  └─ repos
      │     └─ themerator
      │        └─ themerator.py ⇒ 14
      └─ .config
         └─ nvim
            ├─ plugged
            │  ├─ buffer-tree
            │  │  └─ plugin
            │  │     └─ buffer-tree.vim ⇒ 4
            │  └─ buffer-minimalism
            │     └─ plugin
            │        └─ buffer-minimalism.vim ⇒ 10
            └─ init.vim ⇒ 1

This is a little inconvenient, as a lot of vertical space is taken up by directories with no buffers. You can set g:buffertree_compress to 1 to "compress" your trees where possible. In this case, the tree above would look like

└─ home/el
   ├─ .config/nvim
   │  ├─ plugged
   │  │  ├─ buffer-minimalism/plugin/buffer-minimalism.vim ⇒ 10
   │  │  └─ buffer-tree/plugin/buffer-tree.vim ⇒ 4
   │  └─ init.vim ⇒ 1
   └─ personal
      ├─ repos/themerator/themerator.py ⇒ 14
      └─ vim/buffer-tree
         ├─ README.md ⇒ 2
         └─ plugin/buffer-tree.vim ⇒ 3

Highlight groups

The plugin uses a highlight group BufferTreeFile to highlight files to make it easier to parse the relevant parts of the tree.

Modifying the "arrow"

The "⇒" character is used by default for separating the file path and buffer number, but this can be customised using the `g:buffertree_arrow` global variable.

Modifying the default file-path separator

On Windows systems the backwards slash character (\) is used by as the file-path separator and initially buffer-tree will not render the ascii tree correctly and the tree will be "flat", i.e.

BufferTree
├─ C:\the\path\to\file\one
├─ C:\the\path\to\file\two
├─ C:\the\different\path\to\file\three
├─ C:\the\different\path\to\file\four
└─ D:\the\path\to\file\five

This is because the plugin separates each sub-directory in a path according to the g:buffertree_path_sep global variable (set to / by default). If you are using a Windows system or notice that buffer-tree is not nesting properly then change the value of g:buffertree_path_sep.

Contributing

Please do! If you find the plugin useful then any contributions are welcome. Things that need doing:
- add line number and column number for each buffer