Since I advocate vim to a lot of freshers and beginners, I get a lot of questions on using it. A friend asked me how to start gvim with multiple files so that they are opened in separate tabs, which have been a highlight since the 7.0 release. A very common requirement, since most of the other editors use it as the default.
However, vim has traditionally been a console editor. The way it supports editing multiple files is through buffers, and buffers are not same as tabs. So, by default vim, and hence gvim, does not open multiple tabs when you start it with multiple files. However, being one of the most extensive tools you will ever use, it provides a way of doing this. The following command should do this for you:
gvim -p .vimrc .gvimrc
This also works with vim which works in the console. You can create an alias on your Unix system if you want this as the default behavior. I can have the following alias in my .bashrc
alias gvim='gvim -p'
If you are on the Windows, where it is a sin to use the command line, you can configure the Send To options to add a shortcut with the following command.
"C:\vim\vim70\gvim.exe" -p "%*"
There are many more customizations that you can do to make vim behave as you want. All you need to do is just explore.
