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Configuring Vim as an External Editor in WinSCP
Vim can be easily configured for use with WinSCP. To configure Vim as an external editor in WinSCP, do the following:
- From the menu of WinSCP, select Options > Preferences
- Select Editors from the left pane of the Preferences window.
- From Editor Preference, select Add …
- From the Add Editor window, click on the External editor radio button.
- Click the Browse button and navigate to the path where Vim is installed. For example, the default installation for a Windows installation of Vim is
“C:\Program Files\Vim\vim72\(Assuming Vim 7.2 is your version). You could also apply these steps to the portable version of Vim as well. - Select gvim.exe as the editor. (Note: This selects the GUI version of Vim.)
You will notice the the box will return something that looks similar to the following:
”C:\Program Files\Vim\vim72\gvim.exe“ !.!
Make sure to leave the !.! as it is at the end of the string.
For simple use of Vim, choosing any of the External editor options below the Editor selection are optional depending on your needs. However, as you will see in the next section, this is not the case for using Vim with multiple tabs. To complete the external editor selection, click the OK button at each dialog to finish the setup.
Whenever you right-click on a file and select Edit, the file will be loaded into Vim for editing.
Configuring WinSCP for Vim Multi-Tab Use
Vim supports multiple tabs as of version 7. Invoking a multiple tab session requires an additional command line argument to be passed to Vim. Step 6 above documents what is returned when the Vim editor executable (gvim.exe) is selected. The string ”C:\Program Files\Vim\vim72\gvim.exe“ !.!
is indicated in the box for External editor. In order to enable multiple tab support, you must pass the –remote-tab-silent argument to the command line just before !.!. To make this change, place your cursor in the drop-down box after the ” and before the !.!.
Just type in –remote-tab-silent. Make sure there is a space between that and !.!.
The full command line string should look accordingly:
“C:\Program Files\Vim\vim72\gvim.exe” –remote-tab-silent !.!
In the section below titled External editor options (affects editing remote files only), make sure the box titled External Editor opens each file in separate window (process) is Un-Checked. You want each file to open in Vim in the same process since the tabs are derived in the same Vim session.
To edit files in Vim using multiple tabs, select either one or multiple files in the WinSCP file Explorer using your mouse and keyboard. Right click on one of the highlighted files and select Edit. Vim will load the selected files in separate tabs in one Vim edit session. Any time you want to edit an additional file in the same session, just right-click on it and select Edit. The file will be loaded into a new tab in the original Vim session.