NetRW is the default browsing of the filesystem plugin, and it comes with vim for years now. It is available in both Vim and NeoVim.

Please navigate to vim-nav-playground. If you did not clone it, it can be found here

Lets go over some basic movements. You can use all the same navigation as you would while editing, but for file navigation.

vim .

Lets go down, j, to src and press <CR> (enter). Notice that it opens the folder. We see a couple of files. Lets scroll to twitch.c and press <CR>.

What just happened?

How do we open back up our file navigation?

:Vex

:Vex stands for (V)ertical (ex)plore. Meaning, split the current view experience vertically (direction of line) and insert a netrw at current buffer location.

This is pretty - ok -. Hopefully, if you are of the vim mentality, you are thinking it cannot take this many keystrokes just to do these things. I must be able to customize the netrw experience. The answer, of course, is yes to both.

Lets step up our vim knowledge. First, lets quit and re-open up our vimrc.

If you don't remember, or starting here, here is our vimrc so far.

Vim My Way Color My Pencils

set scrolloff=8
set number
set relativenumber
set tabstop=4 softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
set smartindent

" This was from the colorscheme section
colorscheme desert