Nice Tab Navigation in Vim

Making tabs in Vim is annoying. So I wrote a function to make it less annoying.

the code

function! SwitchTab(n) abort

    let l:total_tab_pages = tabpagenr('$')
    " alias for readability
    let l:last_tab_page = tabpagenr('$')

    if a:n == 0
        execute  l:last_tab_page . 'tabnext'
    else
        if l:total_tab_pages < a:n
            tabnew | call termopen($SHELL) | startinsert
        " workaround for  <a-1> not being recognized
        " switch to 1st tab if key pressed
        elseif tabpagenr() == a:n
            execute '1tabnext'
        else
            execute  a:n . 'tabnext'
        endif
    endif
endfunction

nnoremap <silent> <A-1> :call SwitchTab(1)<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <A-2> :call SwitchTab(2)<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <A-3> :call SwitchTab(3)<CR>

" switch to current tab page + 1 (creates new tab or goes to next)
nnoremap <silent> <A-S-n> :call SwitchTab(tabpagenr() + 1)<CR>
" switch to current tab page - 1 (creates new tab or goes to previous)
nnoremap <silent> <A-S-p> :call SwitchTab(tabpagenr() - 1)<CR>

Keeping with (my interpretation of) the UNIX philosophy, we switch to the next tab. If it doesn’t exist, we create a new one.

If we’re at the 1st tab and try to go to the previous one, instead of some pointless error message, it will wrap around to the last one.