The netrw Style Options

I use netrw a fair bit mainly because of Tim Pope’s vinegar.vim plugin. I press - to see a list of files in the current directory, and then navigate around using Vim shortcuts and search. You can open netrw in a similar way without installing vinegar.vim, just type :e . and you'll see a list of files.

The way Vim displays files in this view is actually configurable — you can press i to toggle through the available view types. This is what the "long" view looks like:

I like this mode, so to make it permanent I added the following line to my .vimrc:

let g:netrw_liststyle=1

The available options are:

• 0: Thin, one file per line
• 1: Long, one file per line with file size and time stamp
• 2: Wide, which is files in columns
• 3: Tree style

The tree works well if you’re working on a project with nested folders and you want to jump around a lot. Again, you can press i to toggle between modes, so you can switch to the one that's right for the task at hand.