Opening a file without closing Oil

[6H075T2]

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Describe the feature

I want to open a file in Oil without closing Oil after opening a file in a new buffer. Is there any way to do this?

Provide background

Sometimes I'm working with multiple files and want to open them with Oil and it gets tedious if every time I open a file, I do the process of opening Oil and selecting the file again and again.

What is the significance of this feature?

nice to have

Additional details

Mini.files have similar feature with their go_in function.

[jakubbortlik]

Hi @6H075T2, you are probably looking for the select_split, select_vsplit and select_tab functions. See :h actions.select_split. They even have default keybindings (that you can change when setting up the plugin, see :h oil-config):

        ["<C-s>"] = "actions.select_vsplit",
        ["<C-h>"] = "actions.select_split",
        ["<C-t>"] = "actions.select_tab",

[6H075T2]

Hello @jakubbortlik, I'm fairly new to Neovim's ecosystem and I'm used to editing files per buffer because my monitor is too small to handle multiple splits. I want the same functionality as the GIF above where I can open files in Oil in a new buffer without closing Oil.

[jakubbortlik]

Oh, I see, I didn't notice that you are opening the new buffers in individual tabs. Well, I'm not used to this kind of workflow, and I'm not sure this is fully supported in oil.nvim. The select action can take an opts table where you can specify, whether the original oil buffer should be closed (see :h oil.select), but it doesn't seem to work for float windows. As a workaround you can use the callback parameter of select and open the oil buffer again. This does not work as nicely as the mini example, since the screen flickers due to closing and reopening the oil buffer, but it's close enough:
If you are using lazy.nvim, you can place this in a oil.lua file somewhere in your config directory:

return {
  'stevearc/oil.nvim',
  opts = {
    float = {
      max_width = 80,
    },
    keymaps = {
      ["<C-t>"] =  '<cmd>lua require("oil").select({close=false, tab=true}, function() require("oil").open_float() end)<cr>',
    },
  },
  config = function(_, opts)
    require("oil").setup(opts)
    vim.keymap.set("n", "-", "<CMD>lua require('oil').open_float()<CR>", { desc = "Open parent directory in floating window" })
  end
}

[6H075T2]

Thanks for your help @jakubbortlik. I'm hoping the maintainer sees this and find a way to implement it would be a great help.

[windowsrefund]

Yea, this doesn't appear to work

    ["<S-CR>"] = { "actions.select", opts = { close = false }, desc = "Open entry under the cursor without closing Oil" },

I see the work-around mentioned above involving the 2 step approach (select, open_float()) but can foresee edge cases like that follow-up open_float opening cwd rather than the path where the user was when selecting the file. That said, it would be much cleaner to know close = false was honored.