How do I close all buffers that aren't shown in a window in vim?

Question

I have a horde of buffers open in vim, with only a few of them open in split windows or on other tabs. Is there a way to close all but the ones that are currently visible i

Answer 1

Add this to your .vimrc:

function! CloseHiddenBuffers()
  let i = 0
  let n = bufnr('$')
  while i < n
    let i = i + 1
    if bufloaded(i) && bufwinnr(i) < 0
      exe 'bd ' . i
    endif
  endwhile
endfun

Then you can do this to close hidden buffers:

:call CloseHiddenBuffers()

(You'll probably want to bind a key or a command to it.)

Update:

Here's a version updated to support tab pages. (I don't use tab pages myself, so I hadn't realized that bufwinnr only works for windows on the current page).

function! CloseHiddenBuffers()
  " figure out which buffers are visible in any tab
  let visible = {}
  for t in range(1, tabpagenr('$'))
    for b in tabpagebuflist(t)
      let visible[b] = 1
    endfor
  endfor
  " close any buffer that's loaded and not visible
  for b in range(1, bufnr('$'))
    if bufloaded(b) && !has_key(visible, b)
      exe 'bd ' . b
    endif
  endfor
endfun