VIM Tips: Basic Windowing

As you can see from the screenshot below, I like to work with a lot of terminal screens at once.

I like to see everything I’m working on at a glance and so I’ve never picked up the habit of using VIM’s tabbed environment. I do, however, like the benefits the tabbed environment offers, namely: a single terminal; a single VIM environment for yanking, putting, etc.; and an ever increasing amount of area for code.

To accomplish this, I use VIM’s windowing features. What follows is a list and description of the one’s I primarily use:

vim -o <file 1> <file 2> ... <file n> # opens a vim session with as many VIM windows as there are files  
 :sp <filename>      # opens a new file in a new VIM window above the currently focused window  
 [n]CTRL-Ww          # Rotates focus down 'n' windows (default 1; Same as CTRL-Wj)  
 [n]CTRL-Wk          # Rotates focus up 'n' windows (default 1)  
 [n]CTRL-W-          # Reduces size of focused window by 'n' lines (default 1)
 [n]CTRL-W+          # Increases size of focused window by 'n' lines (default 1)
 CTRL-Wx             # flips the position of focused window and window below (e.g. window in position 1 will be put in position 2 while the window in position 2 is put into position 1)  

If you have one (or more) practical examples of VIM’s windowing, put them in the comments below. I’d love to see other ways people are using this particular feature