Recent file history in Vim?

I would like to access recent files that I had opened and then closed in GVim. I open and close GVim frequently. I would like to access recent files from previous sessions as well.

Does GVim store recent files some开发者_如何转开发where as Word and many other desktop apps store? How to access them?

At least terminal vim stores the previous ten files into ~/.viminfo in the filemarks section. You can use '0, '1, '2, ... '9 to jump among them.

(Probably only useful for '0 to get back to the last file you were editing, unless your memory is stronger than mine.)

You can also use the :browse oldfiles command to get a menu with numbers.

The best way that I use is

:browse oldfiles

Easiest way on vim.

There is mru.vim, which adds the :MRU command.

Very late answer here ... expounding on @sarnolds answer - You can view the file history with the oldfiles command @see :h oldfiles or :h viminfo

:oldfiles 

Furthermore, you can have fine-grained file management with views and sessions ... @see :h mkview and :h mksession for specifics ...

Use :bro ol then press the number that corresponds to the file you want to open.

There is an Swiss knife of file switching CtrlP plugin, which is also part of janus distributive. It has :CtrlPMRU command with smart lookup among recently used files.

Note: CtrlP maintains its own list of most recent used files in g:ctrlp_cache_dir."mru/cache.txt". It is not reusing viminfo (set viminfo?) which contains a list of file marks. This is useful if you want to clear this list.

Adding my 2 cents here because fzf was was not mentioned in earlier answers, which is such a wonderful tool:
fzf.vim has a :History command that lets you search the most recent used files in a fuzzy and search while you type manner.
I customize the (default) behavior of this command by not letting fzf reorder the search results list to the best match: I want the order of all matching filenames to keep being the order in which these files were last used.
To accomplish this customization, I added the following in my .vimrc to override the default History command defined by the fzf.vim plugin:

    command! -bang -nargs=* History
      \ call fzf#vim#history({'options': '--no-sort'})

EDIT:
Currently I'm using a neovim only plugin telescope.nvim which is very similar to fzf.vim, it has the command :Telescope old_files. And it can use the fzf algorithm as a sorting algorithm in the backend (which is currently recommended over the default sorter).
It looks a bit nicer, but can be a bit slower depending on the context. It is not as mature as fzf, but to me easier to customize, it is all lua script.
If you are a neovim only user, definitely worth checking out imho.

MRU has lot of features as explained here: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/08/vim-editor-how-to-setup-most-recently-used-documents-features-using-mru-plugin/

The CtrlP plugin lets you search through your recently used files as well as files in the current directory with this command:

nnoremap <c-p> :CtrlPMixed<cr>

This saves you the hassle of having to deal with built in Vim commands and the MRU plugin, neither of which let you do fuzzy file searching, which is critical when working on larger projects.

You might be able to access the list from the command line with:

grep '^>' ~/.viminfo|cut -c3-|sed 's,~,'"$HOME"','

Explanation:

grep '^>' ~/.viminfo  #find the list of recent files
cut -c3-              #remove the first 2 characters
sed 's,~,'"$HOME"','  #replace ~ with absolute path

You could have a bash alias if you use this regularly

alias vim_mru="grep '^>' ~/.viminfo|cut -c3-|sed 's,~,'\"$HOME\"','"

As seen in the comments here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/571955/undo-close-tab-in-vim), your file is probably still open in a buffer:

:ls " get the buffer number
:tabnew +Nbuf " where N is the buffer number

For example you can reopen the third buffer in a new tab (use :e instead if you don't use tabs):

:tabnew +3buf

:ls to list recent files with buffer number on left-hand column.

Then do :b{buffer-number} to jump there.

Example: :ls shows list of files. I want to jump to third-last file I visited. :b3 will take me there.

For faster searching, map :ls to something, e.g. <Leader>. in your .vimrc file.

One more plugin that let's you choose file from the list of last modified ones is staritfy. It replaces your start screen with a list of most recently modified files. You can always open this page later using :Startify command.

Also you can go back with ctrl+O.