Opening help topics

[LinearG]

I typically invoke a help topic with :tab help topic because I prefer this unmixed, full terminal view. But this causes bad things to happen with buftabline enabled. Tab labels appear to duplicate, or disappear, and navigation with bnext misbehaves.

I see that help buffers get filtered in user_buffers() but I was unable to successfully modify this for my purposes.

Is it possible to add a global option to allow for help in its own tab? Perhaps it would be desirable to generalize this option so people can decide if they want to see other buftypes in their own tabs?

[ap]

I’d have to think about how to support that use case.

The general situation is that if you create any actual Vim tabs, Buftabline disables itself and allows the standard Vim tab stuff to take over. If that’s not happening for you, something else is broken.

Of course that’s not a very useful thing to do; it’s just a last-resort fallback. It’s a long-standing intention of mine to add reasonable real tab support to Buftabline (cf. #22). Nothing will change for you without that (assuming it’s not currently broken in some other way, as per previous paragraph).

I don’t know how helpful even that will be to you, though; as you’ve found, Buftabline tries to avoid cluttering its “tabs” with internal-use buffers. I guess help buffers could be optionally excluded from that since it can be useful for them to be visible and there’s only ever one of those (under normal circumstances) anyway.

None of that will change your issues regarding navigation with bnext though, because Buftabline has nothing to do with that in the first place. All it does is display buffers. (OK, it also sets up <Plug> mappings that can be used for switching to buffers… but even that requires manual setup.)