Diff two tabs in Vim

bufferdifftabsvimvimdiff

Scenario: I have opened Vim and pasted some text. I open a second tab with :tabe and paste some other text in there.

Goal: I would like a third tab with a output equivalent to writing both texts to files and opening them with vimdiff.

The closest I can find is "diff the current buffer against a file", but not diffing two open but unsaved buffers.

Best Solution

I suggest opening the second file in the same tab instead of a new one.

Here's what I usually do:

:edit file1
:diffthis
:vnew
:edit file2
:diffthis

The :vnew command splits the current view vertically so you can open the second file there. The :diffthis (or short: :difft) command is then applied to each view.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Solution

Related Solutions

How to effectively work with multiple files in Vim

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Related Question

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.