Oil (file manager)

Oil is one of the most popular Neovim plugins. It's a file manager that works different from others, provided by plugins like NvimTree or similar.

Oil handles directories like ordinary vim buffers. To delete a file, simply delete the line, to add one insert a new line, to rename just edit the file name. Oil does not commit your changes to the file system until you save the buffer representing the directory and it will ask you whether you really want to do the changes. So, as long as you do not save the Oil buffer and confirm the changes, nothing is changed on your file system.

Using Oil in this config

The keyboard mapping Ctrl+F8 can be used in any buffer to open Oil with the directory of the file you're editing set as its base.

Additionally, some pickers like the Zoxide picker may offer shortcuts to open a directory with Oil.

Leaving Oil

Since oil is an ordinary buffer (just an unlisted one), you don't really have to close it. You can, for example, use Ctrl+E to select another buffer. Or just open another file by any means. Or go back in the history by using Ctrl+O or Ctrl+Shift+Left.

Configuring Oil

The configuration file is in lua/plugins/oil.lua. Please refer to the plugin documentation fore more information.