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<h3>A small heads-up</h3>
Since developing this plugin, I've also developed <a href=https://github.com/el-iot/buffer-tree-explorer>buffer-tree-explorer</a>. I personally prefer <code>buffer-tree-explorer</code>, as it's just more usable (by its nature). Check it out if you're interested!
<h1>buffer-tree</h1>
<img src="./assets/compressed.png" width="60%" height="40%" align="right">
A vim-plugin for rendering your buffer-list as an ascii-tree, written entirely in Vimscript. <br/><br/>
<p>The image on the right shows how the buffer-tree behaves when <code>g:buffertree_compress=1</code> and the <code>BufferTreeFile</code> highlight group is set to <code>yellow</code>.<p><br/>
<h2>Why?</h2>
I am a fan of both <a href='https://github.com/jceb/vmux'>vmux</a> and <a href='https://github.com/tpope/vim-obsession'>vim-obsession</a>, so I often have a <b>lot</b> of vim-buffers open at once. Sometimes it can be hard to parse where all of my buffers are using the <code>:buffers</code> 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
<code>BufferTree</code> 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.
<h2>Installation</h2>Add this line to your <code>init.vim</code> / <code>.vimrc</code> file:
Plug 'el-iot/buffer-tree.vim'
then <code>source</code> the file and run <code>PlugInstall</code> (though you may need to modify it slightly if you use a different plugin manager).
<h2>Usage</h2> All you need is the <code>BufferTree</code> command. <h2>Configuration</h2> <h3> Compressing the BufferTree </h3> 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 <code>g:buffertree_compress</code> 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
<h3>Highlight groups</h3>
The plugin uses a highlight group <code>BufferTreeFile</code> to highlight files to make it easier to parse the relevant parts of the tree.
<h3>Modifying the "arrow"</h3>
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.
<h3>Modifying the default file-path separator</h3>
On Windows systems the backwards slash character (<code>\</code>) 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
.