Configure tab to show list of variants instead of cycling through in VIM

Question

When opening new buffer it VIM, I type:

new /path/to/fi

If I hit "tab" at this point it cycles through files. How to configure VIM to show list of variants instead of going for the first one?

Answer 1

set wildmenu

Is all you need to add to your .vimrc. Read :help wildmenu.

Answer 2

Set your wildmode setting to something different, for example

set wildmode=list:longest

If I misunderstood the question completely, yell ... :)

Answer 3

(This is not a direct answer to your question, but I think it's even better :)

You should check out the Command-T plugin, inspired by TextMate's 'Go To File'. It filters out possible combinations very intelligently, just type a few characters of each subdirectory enough to distinguish it and it 'gets' it, the characters don't have to be at the beginning and can don't have to be sequential. It also shows you a list of options left.

I realize this is a terrible explanation so check out this video to see how it works.

The downside is it requires Vim to be compiled with Ruby support.