bash - Open files in existing Gvim in multiple (new) tabs

Question

I have put some aliases in my .bashrc to open a group of project files in gvim, each in their own tab:

gvim -p <list of file names using absolute paths>

This is all well and good, except there are several groups of files I might want to move between at any given time (my current project uses Ruby on Rails, so that explains that). What would be really awesome is if I could append the new tabs to an existing instance of gvim. In my last position I worked on Vista; I got around this by opening a bunch of empty tabs in gvim, which allowed me to right-click on a filename and choose "Open in existing No-Name gvim." Now I use Ubuntu and there's no such thing on the context menu. Is there any way to do this from the command line?

Answer 1

If vim is compiled with the clientserver option, you can do it. Start your vim instance with the following flag:

$ gvim --servername GVIM  # GVIM is the server name. It can be anything.

To open more tabs in this instance, you can run the command:

$ gvim --servername GVIM --remote-tab file1 file2 file3 ...

The clientserver feature in vim is very handy. It's not limited to opening files; it can be used to send any command to vim using the command-line. For example, to close a vim instance remotely, you can use:

$ gvim --servername GVIM --remote-send '<Esc>:wqa<CR>'