Reload all vim buffer windows from disk

Oct 13, 2016 using tags vim

This tip is useful for folks who rely on the split-window feature of vim.

Open files in vim buffers sometimes get modified outside the context of vim, for example in git operations (rebasing, etc). This inevitably leads to stale buffers and the dreaded warning:

"test.txt"
WARNING: The file has been changed since reading it!!!
Do you really want to write to it (y/n)?

One simple way to work around this is to switch to each window and run e! manually, which reloads the file from disk. This of course can be quite cumbersome for many buffers, which leads us to:

:windo e!

That command basically runs e! on each open (vim) window and aggregates the result into something like:

"file1" 195L, 6288C
"file2" 100L, 82C
"test.txt" 10L, 44C
Press ENTER or type command to continue

Remember that the ! in that command will throw away any unsaved changes so if you prefer to confirm before overwriting changes, you probably want to use :windo e instead.

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