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How to work with Sessions in Vim

on Sysadmin, Easy, Linux, Vim

If you regularly work with the same files and tabs open in Vim, Sessions could be your new best friend

📣 For our previous tutorial on how to open multiple tabs in one vim session click here

Using the powers you gained from the tutorial above, lets go ahead and open a few tabs up in VIM ...

tabs

and while we're at it, lets do some vsplits and splits to open split windows in one Vim window..

in Vim "escape mode" type

:vsplit <<your_filename_here>>

or

:split <<your_filename_here>>

to open multiple splits, you can switch between these splits using ctrl w w to cycle through them

You can resize them with the following command

:resize <<number>>

Heres a few I opened for this example,

splits

| 👌 We will create another tutorial further explaining splits in Vim soon!

Now... onto these sessions I promised you...

Lets make a session

Now you have all your splits and tabs opened, simply go to "escape mode" by pressing esc and type the following ( replace sessionnamehere with an actual name eg: SeanTest.vim)

:mksession ~/.vim/session/session_name_here.vim

👍 TIP: if the ~/.vim/sessions/ directory doesnt exist, you can create it without leaving VIM! heres how, (in "escape mode")

:!mkdir ~/.vim/sessions/

and then try the mksession command again

now that we have a session created (you can check it with this command in escape mode)

:!ls ~/.vim/sessions/

output: ls

we can close vim, and go have a cup of coffee...we did it!

Well how do I get that session back?

Oh thats easy... you can do it in one of two ways

  • from the command line:
vim -S ~/.vim/sessions/session_name_here.vim
  • from inside vim (in "escape mode")
:source ~/.vim/sessions/session_name_here.vim

and all your tabs and splits are back! woohoo! homer

So, now try to think which files it would be good to have in a session... for example, all configuration files for your system

  • /etc/ntp.conf
  • /etc/password
  • /etc/groups
  • /etc/shadow
  • /etc/hosts
  • etc etc etc

Today we learned how to open multiple splits and tabs in Vim, how to save these splits and tabs to a session and how to reopen that session at a later time.

If Sean Helped You today, feel free to share this post or connect with us soon, available via gmail, slack or github. Thanks for reading!