How to get vim to retain cursor position when opening a split

Question

When I open a vertical split in vim, it takes my current line and bumps it to the top of the buffer (scrolling the entire file up). How do I get vim to retain its current position?

Answer 1

EDIT: REAL ANSWER: see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9625028/vim-buffer-position-change-on-window-split-annoyance

TLDR: This behavior only happens on the first time a new window is created. If you close the window and do it again, the cursor in the new buffer is the same as in the old buffer. The answer on there was to do something useless that opens then closes a window, and then to do your vertical split.

Here's another .vimrc mapping that wraps the answer from stackoverflow to do that for you:

map <C-S-O> :tabnew<CR>bwipeout<CR>:vs<CR>

So when you press ctrl-shift-o it will open a new blank tab (:tabnew<CR>), delete the buffer (:bwipeout<CR>) and then do your vertical split (:vs<CR>)

Hope this is better - works perfectly for me. Thanks for making me want to figure out something usable to work around this annoying behavior!

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This happens all the time to me! I recently came up with an answer that works most of the time (better than nothing though). Put this in your .vimrc:

map <C-S-O> mmH:vs<CR>`m<C-W>l`m<C-W>h

Everytime you press ctrl+shift+o it should do a vertical split and put the cursor on the same line and column you had it in the original buffer before you split.

The behavior in vim that this tries to get around is when the buffer you are editing is larger than can be currently displayed. Depending on where the cursor is in the buffer (exactly in the middle, upper-half, lower-half), once you do a :vs (vertical split), it will scroll the new buffer down or up to where it thinks best.

The .vimrc mapping above is doing:

map <C-S-O>                                     map ctrl-shift-o to run this

            mm                                  mark the current cursor position

              H                                 move the cursor to the top of
                                                the buffer

               :vs<CR>                          do a vertical split

                      `m                        move to line and column of mark

                        <C-W>l                  move focus to the right to the
                                                original buffer

                              `m                move the cursor in the orig buffer
                                                back to the marked position

                                <C-W>h          move back to the new buffer on
                                                the left

Again, it works most of the time for me, not sure why it doesn't work all the time. Anyways, hope this helped some

Answer 2

This might be happening because you have long lines that are getting bunched up by the vertical split. If you :set nowrap and then :vsp you'll notice that it doesn't happen.