How to open a terminal in new tab from VIM?

:tab ter

opens a terminal in a new tab instead of opening it in a new window as :ter does. You can also use the equivalent, longer :tab terminal form.

Credits to user wolloda in this Reddit post.

Extra information

Terminating the shell with Ctrl-d or exit closes the terminal buffer.
Ctrl-w N or Ctrl-\ Ctrl-n put the buffer in the terminal-normal mode: Keystrokes are not forwarded to the shell, but are used by Vim as in a normal buffer (although the shell job is still running). Then you can use gt to change tabs, type Ex commands such as :ls, etc. To bring the terminal buffer back to life, i, a, ...
If you are going to map this, I recommend using :tab ter++kill=hup, so that when you :qa the terminal job does not prevent Vim from quitting. And this is the signal normal terminal emulators send to its jobs when closed anyway.

For terminal mode mappings, use tnoremap, for example

tnoremap <S-Tab> <C-W>:tabprevious<CR>
tnoremap <C-N>   <C-W>N

More information on :help :terminal and :help :tab.

In 2019, vim now has a Terminal mode.

:help terminal

For example, you can use it like this.

# go to terminal-job mode
:terminal

# go to terminal-normal mode
ctrl-w N

# go back to terminal-job mode
i

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