File explorer in vim

In the noughties, I found a blog post that showed how to setup vim as a Python IDE. I lost that config and I've been on the look out ever since. I've also been looking for the "components" of it -- what gave the file explorer? How did it split the screen? etc.

Today, Ben Eater released a video about writing a BIOS for his homebrew 6502 computer. At about 09:14, he split the vim window, opening a file explorer in the current directory on the left-hand side of the screen, moved to the cursor over a file, and opened it in the original pane.

You can do the same with :Lexplore. You can set the column width of the file explorer with :<N>Lexplore, where <N> is the width in number of columns.

It sounded like Ben used a single keystroke to open the explorer. doismellburning in the Overthinking Everything Discord linked me to NERDTree, which also showed me the nnoremap command to bind keys and combinations to other commands. I suspect Ben has a nnoremap in his .vimrc for Lexplore.

It took too long to find this out, but I eventually found it in the docs using :help explore. I also didn't know that vim had built-in help until today, which I learned from Ottinger's "Use Vim Like A Pro".

So yea, today I found a piece of a thing I once saw when I was in my teens. Others may also find it useful!