How do I get macvim tabs to display graphically?

Question

I've installed macvim via brew install macvim and turned on the "With a tab for each file" option in the preferences, but the tabs I get are VIM style tabs. Not the OS tabs you see on the macvim homepage: http://code.google.com/p/macvim/. See below for a screenshot.

Is there anything I can do to get the OS tabs?

Answer 1

Try do set guioptions+=e. This should fix your problem.

From help guioptions:

'e'     Add tab pages when indicated with 'showtabline'.
        'guitablabel' can be used to change the text in the labels.
        When 'e' is missing a non-GUI tab pages line may be used.
        The GUI tabs are only supported on some systems, currently
        GTK, Motif, Mac OS/X and MS-Windows.

To see the current value of your guioptions, do :set guioptions?

It's very likely that in your .vimrc you removed e from your guioptions. Here is my guioptions that works the way you wanted: guioptions=gtrLme

Answer 2

Other option to always show the tab bar.

Add to vimrc:

set showtabline=2

From the vim_mac mailing list archives. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/vim_mac/showtab/vim_mac/zvw9MQYhnsg/jDNsqgDsHQ4J