CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsvim
SylarBenes
SylarBenes

Reputation: 411

Vim stuck in "3 files to edit"

When opening a file with vim instead of putting the whole path I accidentally just wrote the path to the directory. So instead of:

vi myDirectory/myFile.txt

I put

vi myDirectory

Now vim has taken this to mean that I want to edit all 3 files in this directory and is stuck in that mode. I can quit vim and return to the console, but when I try to open the file with the full path vi myDirectory/myFile.txt I get a blank screen with "2 more files to edit" at the bottom. And then when I return to the console the line "3 files to edit" is printed.

How can I exit this situation so that I can continue to use vim normally and edit my file?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 277

Answers (1)

Ingo Karkat
Ingo Karkat

Reputation: 172520

When you attempt to :edit a directory (or pass one as a command-line argument), Vim usually shows a directory listing and lets you browse files, courtesy of the :help netrw plugin. Vim does not automatically select all files from a passed directory.

Based on your report of having additional files also when the desired file's full path is passed, I rather suspect that you somehow have two additional "hidden" arguments to Vim, which Vim interprets as passed files.

This could be caused by a shell alias (in Bash, check type vi). Within Vim, you can list the additional files with :args; if they are indeed strange, non-filename strings, that might give you a clue (or at least some text to search for).

Upvotes: 4

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