Allow to open two distinct editors side by side in one group

VsCode has the ability to horizonatally split an editor window. When you execute code --diff file1 file2 both files are opened side by side in a single editor window with a single header tab. A similar view is presented when you edit the VsCode settings.

This is splitting. It would be nice to be able to do this for my own files to have multiple views of the same file. What would make it actually usable would be the following three enhancements.

1. The option to split either horizontally or vertically.
2. The ability to move focus from one split pane to another.
3. The ability to unsplit (revert the editor back to a single pane).

What we currently have is a keyboard shortcut “workbench.action.splitEditor” which doesn’t actually split an editor at all, instead it just opens the same file in another editor in a different editor group. This is not editor splitting which by definition should occur in the same editor tab.

Calling opening a file in another editor group ‘splitting’ when there is already nascent functionality to support proper splitting is a pointless ambiguity that serves only to reduce the possibility that the editor will ever support proper splitting any time in the near future.

Proposal:

1. Rename “workbench.action.splitEditor” to “workbench.action.openInNewEditorGroup”
2. Make the VsCode diff view usable by adding a keyboard shortcut to permit cycling focus from one editor pane to the other.
3. Add support to split open editor vertically or horizontally by the addition of the additional keyboard shortcuts “editor.action.splitHorizontal”, “editor.action.splitVertical” and “editor.action.unsplit”.

[robertocarta]

+1 This is the only reason why I’m unable to switch from vim to vscode. The idea is that you want to be able to split a tab, not the entire editor. For example, I want one tab vertically split with index.html and controllers.js, and another tab split between directives.js and somethingelse.whateva.

[mmmfarrell]

Vim-style splitting would be awesome! This is the cause of one of the few remaining efficiency decreases I get by switching to VSCode from Vim