Introducing Buftabline
Almost ever since I started using Vim, I have been in search for a satisfactory persistent visualisation of the buffer list. I have used many hacks over the years, some written by others, some of my own attempt. None ever felt right.
Roughly a year ago, I had a sudden moment of clarity: Vim has already had for a while the functionality required to build this feature, it just usually serves a different purpose. Namely, ever since Vim has supported tabs, it has been able to render them both in text mode and as GUI tabs. Their text mode rendering is exactly what a buffer list would need as well. Why not re- (or ab-)use the tabline for buffer tabs?
I implemented a first stab at this but it had several severe deficiencies. It scratched my own itch just well enough, however, so I dragged my feet for a year.
To my chagrin, I cannot even claim to have had this idea first, much less (in my tardiness) claim first implementation: Airline shipped an implementation of this exact idea at the time it occurred to me independently. Oh well. (Subsequently I discovered several more plugins, all of which seem to be younger than Airline’s implementation.)
But recently I finally got around to finishing up my own script to the point where it is actually releasable. So without further ado:
It is designed with the ideal that it should Just Work, and has no configurable behaviour: drop it into your configuration and you’re done. Needless to say I like my own take better than the competitors; but I have also contrasted it with each of them in the documentation, so you can make your own call on that.