Question

Can someone explain to me what sil exe ":sb " . current_buffer does in a vimscript. I’m trying to learn how to use it, but finding documentation on vimscript seems nearly impossible.

Answer 1

That’s a combination of several commands, and all of them are abbreviated.

The commands being used there are :silent, :execute, and :sbuffer. You
can get information on those commands by using :help :silent from within vim,
and the same for the other commands.

The . operator is also being used to do string concatenation.

First the . operator is used to concatenate :sb with the value of the
current_buffer variable. The resulting string is evaluated as if you’d typed
it by the :exe portion, which will supresss messages because it’s part of the
:sil command.

So, the effect is as if you’d typed :sb 4, from normal mode (using 4 there as
the value of current_buffer). This would split the current window and use the
new window to edit buffer number 4.