Navigating in Vim – Arumoy Shome

The gf visits the file under the cursor if it exists in the path variable. I find this quite useful and use it constantly (for instance to navigate to imported files in python projects). There are several variants of this command:

`gF`	same as `gf` but also navigate to the line
`C-w f`	same as `gf` but open in a split window
`C-w F`	same as `C-w f` with line number
`C-w gf`	same as `gf` but open in new tab
`C-w gF`	same as `C-w gf` with line number

Since the line number variants fall back to their non line number counter parts, I remap them to the non line number variants.

~/.vimrc

nmap gf gF
nmap <C-w>f <C-w>F
nmap <C-w><C-f> <C-w>F
nmap <C-w>gf <C-w>gF

Vim provides the <cname> parameter which expands to the filename under the cursor. To make gf automatically create the file if it doesn’t exist, a mapping can be created: map fg :e <cname>. However, I prefer to keep this operation transparent and manual (so that I know what I am doing). Check :h gf for more info. The visual variant of gf uses the visual selection as the filename.

Vim also allows navigation by tags using C-[. This however requires the external ctags command and the tag generation is left to the user.

Finally vim provides the :find command which searches for the given file in path and opens the first hit. The :sfind does the same but in a split window. Both commands accept a glob pattern which I extensively use to find what I need to edit without a fuzzy finder.