52

When launching vim from the command line, I can do for example vim *.txt to open all text files in a directory at once.

For some reason, trying the same from inside vim ( :e *.txt ) gives an error: E77: Too many file names.

Is there a reason why vim refuses to open multiple at once? Is there a way to change that?

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1
  • I use buffers for multiple files, no need to answer about tabs or split. Sorry, should have mentioned that in the question. Commented Sep 6, 2012 at 16:47

4 Answers 4

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82

This should work :

:next *.txt
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4 Comments

Done! I couldn't do it yet when I posted my comment.
If you want to include files in all sub-directories in addition to files in the current directory, use :n **/*.txt
Wonderful!!! I've been looking for this cmd for too long. I do have to say though ":next" is very unintuitive, would be much better to have ":e[dit] *txt" instead!
@mrk Exactly. Opening multiple files is an obvious thing to want to do, so :e should have allowed for that. ":[count]n[ext] [++opt] [+cmd]" means "Edit [count] next file" Er, ok mate, if you say so!
15

It's done in two operations.

Open all *.js files in as many vertical splits:

:argadd *.js
:argdo vs

in horizontal splits:

:argdo sp

in tabs: 

:argdo tabe
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I did the horizontal splits version and it did open all files in the dir, but it created four splits for each file.
2

:args *.txt also works.

If it helps there is more information on this topic at :help argument-list and :help 07.2. Both of those sections help explain how to use the argument list and how the buffer list is not the same thing.

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-2

Also, to add to the other answers, when you first start vim you can open multiple files at the same time, e.g.:

vim *.txt
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3 Comments

That's what OP tried, but he had the error: E77: Too many file names.
@kenorb No, that works fine, it was :e *.txt that gave errors. The real problem with this is that it doesn't work when vim is already running.
That's literally mentioned the first line of the question.

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