How do you quickly access a particular buffer (amongst a long list of buffers) in vim? For ages, i’ve been using :ls, followed by :b<id>, where <id> is the id of a particular buffer.

Recently, i’ve discovered yet another way to acheive it using BufExplorer, to install it, download the latest version & save it to ~/.vim/bundle, then:

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$ cd ~/.vim/bundle
$ unzip bufexplorer.zip

Restart your vim, open several files, & try \be (backslash + b + e), you are then presented with BufExplorer, & within it, u can goto a specific buffer with:

• search with /, followed by enter, or
• goto that line with :<lineno>, followed by enter, or
• simply :b<id>

If you want to be able to goto BufExplorer by doing CTRL-b, just add the following line to ur ~/.vimrc:

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nnoremap <C-B> :BufExplorer<cr>

Alternatively, you may wanna remap how the command :ls works by doing the following instead:

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cabbrev ls :BufExplorer

If you prefer loading BufExplorer in horizontal or vertical split, you may wanna try:

• \bs (backslash + b + s) for horizontal split
• \bv (backslash + b + s) for vertical split

Pick the one u like & have fun !!