When I was in a folder and tried to edit multiple files using glob pattern with the following Neovim command:

I was surprised to find that Neovim gives the following error message:

E77: Too many file names.

This is because the command :edit only supports editing one file. There are several ways to open multiple files at once.

Use argument list#

We can Neovim’s built-in in argument list feature to open multiple files. When we open Neovim from command line with multiple files, argument list will be filled with a list of file names. To replace the argument list with new file names, we can use :args {glob_pattern} or :next {glob_pattern}.

For example, to open all files in current directory with extension .vim, use :args *.vim or :next *.vim. You can then traverse the list of files using : next and :previous command.

For more info, see :h argument-list.

Define your own custom command#

The second way is to define a custom :Edit command that can take glob patterns. Something like the following should work:

function! MultipleEdit(p_list)
  for p in a:p_list
    for c in glob(p, 0, 1)
      execute 'edit ' . c
    endfor
  endfor
endfunction

command! -bar -bang -nargs=+ -complete=file Edit call MultipleEdit([<f-args>])

Then we can use :Edit *.vim or :Edit *.vim *.py to open multiple files.

References#

• How can I open multiple tabs at once?
• How to open multiple files matching a wildcard expression?
• How do I make vim open all files matching a pattern in different tabs?