Question

What would be the most practical way to rename the file you’re currently editing in Vim without messing up your current splits configuration?

Generally, one would need to … save the file under a different name, delete the original one, and re-open the new one without making a mess of the current layout.

Anyone have any idea how to do that in one command (function) or less?

Answer 1

:saveas newname will save the buffer with the new name, make that name the current buffer, and set the alternate buffer to the old file.

:call delete(expand('#')) will then delete the file associated with the alternate buffer.

You can easily turn that into a command with something like

:command! -bang -complete=file -nargs=+ Rename saveas<bang> <args> | call delete(expand('#'))`

---

The user manual provides a thorough description of how to create user commands. Here’s an explanation of the elements I’m using above.

• -bang allows the command to called as either Rename or Rename! and <bang> in the constructed command is replaced by either an empty string or !, depending on how it is called. This is used to support the same functionality in the :saveas command.
• -complete=file will let you tab-complete the path that will be used for the new file, similar to :e and :saveas do.
• -nargs=+ specifies that :Rename requires at least one argument (the filename), but can take more. <args> is replaced with whatever arguments are given to :Rename. This allows you to specify the extra arguments that :saveas accepts, so you could do something like :Rename ++enc=latin1 newfile to rename the file to newfile and change the encoding to latin1.