How to Vim: Take Control of Split Positioning

One of my pet peeves with Vim is that by default the buffer splitting behaves a bit weird:

• horizontal splits (:split) appear on top
• vertical splits (:vsplit) appear on the left

That’s exactly the opposite of how things happen by default in Emacs (and a few other editors), so it really didn’t sit well with me. Obviously you can use dedicated commands to control the split behavior (e.g. :rightbelow split and :botright vsplit¹), but if you want to permanently “improve” the defaults just add the following your .vimrc:

set splitbelow splitright

In case it’s not clear:

• splitbelow alters the behavior of :split (and commands like :help that use :split internally)
• splitright alters the behavior of :vsplit

And that’s it! Now I find using commands like :h a lot more enjoyable, as the help splits appear exactly where I expect them to.

1. Those commands are pretty crazy in the typical spirit of Vim and you can read more about them here. ↩