Recently I was working on a refactor in software project and wanted to get a look at 6 files in a single directory at once. Being able to have all the files on screen at one time would help me get a better look at their contents, compare them, and edit them. I could certainly open each file one by one, calling :split after each to create a new split in Vim and then replacing the contents of that split with :e path/to/file. But surely there must be a faster way to open several files in Vim?

There is and it involves using the Vim argument list. To open horizontal splits with every file in a directory, run these two commands in succession:

• :args path/to/dir/* - Populates the arglist

• :sall - Opens everything in the arglist in splits

Here’s a short screencast showing this in action:

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