schrotie/buffer-tree

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

 ,dPYb,                 ,dPYb, ,dPYb,                        I8
 IP'`Yb                 IP'`Yb IP'`Yb                        I8
 I8  8I                 I8  8I I8  8I                     88888888
 I8  8'                 I8  8' I8  8'                        I8
 I8 dP      gg      gg  I8 dP  I8 dP   ,ggg,    ,gggggg,     I8    ,gggggg,   ,ggg,    ,ggg,
 I8dP   88ggI8      8I  I8dP   I8dP   i8" "8i   dP""""8I     I8    dP""""8I  i8" "8i  i8" "8i
 I8P    8I  I8,    ,8I  I8P    I8P    I8, ,8I  ,8'    8I    ,I8,  ,8'    8I  I8, ,8I  I8, ,8I
,d8b,  ,8I ,d8b,  ,d8b,,d8b,_ ,d8b,_  `YbadP' ,dP     Y8,  ,d88b,,dP     Y8, `YbadP'  `YbadP'
8P'"Y88P"' 8P'"Y88P"`Y8PI8"888PI8"888888P"Y8888P      `Y8  8P""Y88P      `Y8888P"Y888888P"Y888
                        I8 `8, I8 `8,
                        I8  `8,I8  `8,
                        I8   8II8   8I
                        I8   8II8   8I
                        I8, ,8'I8, ,8'
                         "Y8P'  "Y8P'

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