Refresh all files in buffer from disk in vim

The :checkt[ime] command is designed for this very purpose.

It will prompt you to reload any buffers that have changed; if you wish to skip the prompt, you can do :set autoread beforehand (you'll still get a prompt on buffers with local unsaved changes).

It also avoids the syntax highlighting issue mentioned by Steven Lu on the accepted answer; :bufdo turns off syntax highlighting by design.

Found via: http://vim.1045645.n5.nabble.com/Bug-report-bufdo-e-breaking-syntax-highlighting-on-displayed-buffers-tp1209995p1209998.html


Read the documentation for bufdo, it should do what you want.


Here's what I ended up putting in my .vimrc:

fun! PullAndRefresh()
  set noconfirm
  !git pull
  bufdo e!
  set confirm
endfun

nmap <leader>gr call PullAndRefresh()

From :help autoread:

When a file has been detected to have been changed outside of Vim and it has not been changed inside of Vim, automatically read it again. When the file has been deleted this is not done.

If, like me, you just want to always passively reload stale-but-unmodified buffers, then this seems like it should get the job done.

However the final detail is when vim notices the stale buffer. That can be forced with checktime. If you have focus events set up, then we can run checktime whenever we gain focus like so:

set autoread
autocmd FocusGained * checktime

This answer also has some interesting details.