Subject: Re: PSA: How to list the last 100 files you've edited in the Windows gVim editor

Maria Sophia wrote on 4/3/2026 4:30 PM:

PSA:
How to list the last 100 files you've edited in the Windows gVim editor

Doing research all night, as I am wont to do, I was editing what started
out as a batch file but which turned into a long researched listing, and
then in the morning when the sun came up, I shut down the PC and when I
awoke I had forgotten where I had placed the long-edited text file.

I had completely forgotten, in the fog of late-night frenzy sans sleep,
that it was originally a batch file but turned into a simple text file.

I typed "q:" in an empty gvim session to get a list of prior commands,
where I could see some of my search-n-replace actions, but not file names.

I tried the Windows runbox pinned to my taskbar to enter "shell:recent"
but that C:\Users\.\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent folder
was completely empty (possibly due to Windows privacy settings).
Settings > Personalization > Start > Show recently opened items...
But more likely due to the fact that gVim is a win32 application overall.

There's the tedious way which I wouldn't use unless God ordered me to:
C:\> findstr /s /i /m "Some Word" C:\*.txt
(But it turns out that wouldn't have worked as it was in "x.bat".)

Of course I could ls -l the usual dirs but I knew what editor I was using
& I found that gvim 8.2 doesn't have a "recent files" GUI, but it has
:oldfiles
and these are essentially equivalent:
:browse old
:echo v:oldfiles

Which lists the full path to the prior 100 files you have been editing.
I didn't know about ":oldfiles" (which is a privacy issue also), so I
figured I'd let you guys who use the gVim editor know about this trick.

I couldn't get it to work on my Mac.



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