The yet unreleased 2.1 version of XDebug has a nice new feature. The setting xdebug.file_link_format allows you, to provide a printf like format for a link under the filename of an error message: So here comes a quick walkthrough on how to open the file from the error message in (G)VIM: First we need to tell the browser, in my case firefox, that the link is no web link, but should be threaten