Strange bar at top of my MacVim?

Question

There's a bar atop my MacVim where every time I open multiple buffers in one window, it lists them like so: This would be fine, except if I then type ":bn" to get to the next buffer, the bar stops being accurate. It's showing a duplicate entry for 'contact.html' and no entry for 'bio.html': This bar would be useful if it worked properly. But if it won't then I would like to just get rid of it. Problem is, I don't know how it got there. So, does anyone know how to either fix this or get rid of it? My .vimrc is here, if it helps: https://github.com/austintrose/Vim-Files. I couldn't find anything in my .vimrc related to it though. :-/ Thanks!

Accepted Answer

That looks like the “text mode” tab line. Normally, the tabs would be displayed in a GUI-based tab line, but this line (from your `.vimrc`):

```
    set guioptions= 
```

removes the `e` option from `guioptions` which inhibits the GUI tabs and reverts to “text mode” tabs. The description of the `e` option of `guioptions` (`:help 'go-e'`) has this to say:

Add tab pages when indicated with 'showtabline'. … When 'e' is missing a non-GUI tab pages line may be used.

If you want to disable the tab line, then you should probably just set `showtabline` to `0` so that it will always be disabled:

```
set showtabline=0
```

You can put this in your `if has("gui_running")` section if you only want this to apply to your GUI instances of Vim, or you can do it unconditionally to also disable the tab line in tty-based instances of Vim, too.

Alternatively, if you want to have GUI-based tabs, then make sure `guioptions` includes `e`, and `showtabline` is non-zero:

```
set guioptions=e  " instead of clearing this, set it to only `e`
set showtabline=1 " one is the default value
```

Incidentally, you can navigate the tabs with `:tabnext` and `:tabprevious` (in normal mode, `gt` and `gT`, respectively).

Strange bar at top of my MacVim?

Solution

Problem