How can I open several files at once in Vim?

Question

Is there a way to open all the files in a directory from within Vim? So a :command that would say in effect \"Open all the files under /some/path into

Answer 1

A method that doesn't require messing with args is to put the list of files in a text file, and then use the :so command to run the commands in that file.

For example, if you want to open all the files that end in .php in a given directory, first create files.txt containing the list of files, prepended with whatever command you want to use to open them.

sp alpha.php
sp bravo.php
sp charlie.php

Then, within vim:

:so files.txt

If the list of files is large, it's relatively trivial to generate the files.txt file quickly, by redirecting the output of ls to a file, and then using a vim macro to prepend sp before each filename.

This obviously isn't as elegant as using the args and argdo commands, but those commands are also a lot more complicated.

There also might be a way to do this with a single command on the command line, but even after 16 years I still find vim programming to be strange and arcane.