Resize splits

Tired of splits not sizing the way you like? Preview split or the quickfix list not laying out the way you’d like? Annoyed by lines just a hair too long on one size of a vertical split? Want just a few more lines in your :Git window to make sense of what you are looking at? This was a huge frustration for me in Vim. For years I frustratingly accepted it. A while back, on a whim I guessed :res 30 to see if it would resize the quickfix window. Wow, it worked? Many moons later, digging into the help for :resize yielded a number of options for manipulating window size.

As mentioned above, :res N will vertically resize the current split to N lines. But all of the following will work, too. The following mappings resize one line/column at a time. Or, if you prepend them with a number, you can resize N lines at once.

• <Ctrl-w> - – decrease the height of the current split by one line
• <Ctrl-w> + – increase the height of the current split by one line
• <Ctrl-w> > – increase the width of the current split by one line
• <Ctrl-w> < – decrease the width of the current split by one line

When all else fails, you can resize all splits to be sensibly equal in size using C-w=. This last nugget was covered in our tip Equalize your splits. Checkout the video below. In it, I demonstrate the following:

• 5 <Ctrl-w> > – Makes left split 5 columns wider
• 10 <Ctrl-w> < – Makes left split 10 columns narrower
• <Ctrl-w> J – Move current split to the bottom.
• 5 <Ctrl-w> – Make bottom split 5 rows shorter
• 10 <Ctrl-w> + – Make bottom split 10 rows taller
• <Ctrl-w> = – Equalize splits again