Is there a way to open multiple files at once from vim?

Question

When launching vim from the command line, I can do for example vim *.txt to open all text files in a directory at once.

For some reason, trying the same from inside vim ( :e *.txt ) gives an error: E77: Too many file names.

Is there a reason why vim refuses to open multiple at once? Is there a way to change that?

Answer 1

This should work :

:next *.txt

Answer 2

It's done in two operations.

Open all *.js files in as many vertical splits:

:argadd *.js
:argdo vs

in horizontal splits:

:argdo sp

in tabs: 

:argdo tabe