vim-buftabline

There are many ways, depending on what you specifically need. For the most basic command that will probably work immediately, just start up vim with multiple files like so: vim -p file1 file2 This will open file1 and file2 in separate vim tabs. But vim tabs may not behave the way you would expect them to coming from other programs. You might prefer to just list all the buffers within one window instead. There are many plugins dealing with buffer management on the vim wiki and elsewhere. Here are two I found with a Google search that look at a glance like they might work [0], [1] (haven't tried, just looked at the page briefly) [0]: https://github.com/ap/vim-buftabline [1]: https://github.com/bling/vim-bufferline

I used to use bufftabline, https://github.com/ap/vim-buftabline. I think something like it is what you're looking for? If it's not quite right for you the readme in the github repo mentions some other plugins that have similar capabilities. I really liked bufftabline when I used it. It was lightweight and did exactly what I wanted it to do, give me an immediate visual representation of the buffers I had open in a familiar tab-like format. Eventually I moved towards an even lighter weight setup. Take at look at this video is you're interested in anything like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2WjJbmmoM