|              _|   _|
  __ \   |   |  |    |     _ \   __|
  |   |  |   |  __|  __|   __/  |
 _.__/  \__,_| _|   _|   \___| _|
            _)        _)                    | _)
  __ `__ \   |  __ \   |  __ `__ \    _` |  |  |   __|  __ `__ \
  |   |   |  |  |   |  |  |   |   |  (   |  |  | \__ \  |   |   |
 _|  _|  _| _| _|  _| _| _|  _|  _| \__,_| _| _| ____/ _|  _|  _|

buffer-minimalism

A simple vim-plugin for closing those buffers you've been compulsively hoarding. This is particularly useful for users of vmux and vim-obsession.

Why?

I often have a lot of buffers open and many of them are for projects that I haven't touched in weeks. This plugin allows you to quickly delete any buffers you are no longer interested in without you needing to comb through your buffer list and select the buffers / directories you are no longer using.

Importantly, buffer-minimalism does not only use the last write-time (getftime) of any file in any buffer when deciding which buffers to delete. This is because there might be some files that you are looking at a lot, but not actually reading or writing to (documentation, for example). Instead, every time you enter a buffer the plugin will update a buffer-variable called last_read_time to the current timestamp, and the plugin defaults to using this when closing buffers. If last_read_time is not set on a given buffer (this would most often happen when you first install buffer-minimalism with buffers currently open), then the plugin will fall back onto using getftime.

You can also add a whitelist of buffers / patterns to never delete in the event that you want to keep certain buffers open no matter how long it's been since you used them.

Installation

Add this line to your init.vim / .vimrc file (though you may need to modify it slightly if you use a different plugin manager.

Plug 'el-iot/buffer-minimalism.vim'

and run

:PlugInstall

Usage

Simply run

:BufferMinimalism

to declutter your buffers.

Alternatively you can use

:BufferMinimalismList

to show how long each buffer has been unused for, i.e:

:BufferMinimalismList

#3: todo  -> 1 day, 7 hours, 38 minutes, 38 seconds
#4: minimalism.vim  -> 1 hour, 17 minutes, 9 seconds
#5: buffer-minimalism.vim  -> 2 days, 4 hours, 41 seconds
#6: .tmux.conf  -> 2 days, 2 hours, 46 minutes, 59 seconds
#7: external_apps_manager.py  -> 1 day, 8 hours, 2 minutes
#8: ssh-status  -> 2 days, 2 hours, 48 minutes, 14 seconds
#9: count-docker-containers  -> 2 days, 2 hours, 47 minutes, 38 seconds
#10: .zshrc  -> 2 days, 1 hour, 20 minutes, 50 seconds
#12: direnvrc  -> 2 days, 2 hours, 27 minutes, 37 seconds
#13: init.vim  -> 3 days, 22 hours, 5 minutes, 28 seconds
#14: lsp.lua  -> 1 day, 6 hours, 38 minutes, 9 seconds
#25: README.md  -> 45 seconds
#26: tree.vim  -> 1 hour, 18 minutes, 2 seconds
#29: wikipedia_browser.vim  -> 24 minutes, 27 seconds
#30: get_page.sh  -> 38 minutes, 10 seconds
#31: search.sh  -> 1 hour, 10 minutes, 7 seconds

Configuration

g:bufferminimalism_time (default=60*60*24) - The time period (in seconds) that a buffer must have been read / written to in recent history for it to not be deleted.

g:bufferminimalism_whitelist (default=[]) - A list of patterns to match against filenames that should not be deleted in any case.

Highlight groups

The plugin uses two highlight groups BufferMinimalismOld and BufferMinimalismNew to highlight the timedeltas shown in the output of BufferMinimalismList. The recommended highlight groups are:

highlight BufferMinimalismOld ctermfg=red
highlight BufferMinimalismNew ctermfg=green

Contributing

Please do! If you find the plugin useful then any contributions are welcome.