Answer by Lucas Oman for Using Vim's tabs like buffers

You can map commands that normally manipulate buffers to manipulate tabs, as I've done with gf in my .vimrc:

map gf :tabe <cfile><CR>

I'm sure you can do the same with [^

I don't think vim supports this for tabs (yet). I use gt and gT to move to the next and previous tabs, respectively. You can also use Ngt, where N is the tab number. One peeve I have is that, by default, the tab number is not displayed in the tab line. To fix this, I put a couple functions at the end of my .vimrc file (I didn't paste here because it's long and didn't format correctly).