The built-in netrw plugin is a great way to browse files and directories within a Vim session. netrw supports four ways of displaying files and directories. That is, there are four liststyles. You can toggle through these by hitting i.

I prefer the tree liststyle, which is not the default. I can set the tree liststyle as the default by adding the following line to my .vimrc file.

let g:netrw_liststyle = 3

Now, every time I visit or revisit a netrw window, I’ll see everything nicely displayed as a tree.