vim automatically show left tab after closing tab

Question

After closing a tab in vim, how do I make it so that the tab to the left is the one automatically shown?

The default when closing a tab seems to be showing the right tab, which is annoying because new tabs OPEN on the right of your current tab. So opening a new tab and closing it leaves you on a different tab.

Answer 1

A patch has been proposed to add a 'tabcloseleft' option; it is on the todo list to be integrated into Vim (some time in the future, once Bram has time to work on it).

Answer 2

There is one idea: though there is no TabClose event there is TabEnter event which could be used to achieve what you want: if on one of the events number of tabs is less then previously recorded number then obviously it was triggered due to closed tab:

let s:prevtabnum=tabpagenr('$')
augroup TabClosed
    autocmd! TabEnter * :if tabpagenr('$')<s:prevtabnum && tabpagenr()>1
                \       |   tabprevious
                \       |endif
                \       |let s:prevtabnum=tabpagenr('$')
augroup END