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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I found NERTree really akward and was one of the reasons why I originally had trouble switching to VIM from textmate.

Its best to use something like PeepOpen, command-t, fuzzyfinder to open files. If you want tree structure I just use terminal and aliased:

  alias l='ls -AlGFh'

Or use the vim directory navigation.

VIM also looks much nicer with just a single file open. The left panel for NERDTree looks hacky.

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I use NERDTree and quite like it, but I never keep it open. I have :NERDTreeToggle mapped to <Leader>f, so if I need to open a file I can quickly press `,f`, find the file and then press `,f` to close NERDTree. One thing I find annoying about this is that in MacVim, NERDTree creates a scrollbar in the left hand side of the window that I can never seem to get rid of.

Once the files are open, I tend to use buffers, splits and tabs to navigate between them. NERDTree is just used to load a file into a Vim buffer. Also note that the NERDTree explorer replaces the default vim file explorer.

I heard good things about Command-T though, maybe I'll try that and see if it works better with my workflow than NERDTree.

You can remove the left hand scrollbar by setting this command:

    " This removes the left hand scrollbar from the current guioptions.
    :set guioptions-=L

Check out :help guioptions for more. I've set up my vim so I don't have any scrollbars.

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