Vim Shell Patch
I've been following the Vim development mailing list since early January in order to help me keep up with progress on Vim 7. On Friday, somebody mentioned the Vimshell patch in a message about integrated debugging support.
I'd never heard of Vimshell before, but I decided to investigate. One of Vim's major failings is that it can't run an ansi capable shell inside of a buffer. There are some relatively kludgy interactive shell buffer implementations that utilize scripting languages, but none of them are really very useful. I used to have one that uses Python. It doesnt do Ansi, it doesnt do vt100, it doesnt support tab completion, and it has a lot of other issues. Vimshell is different. Implemented in C, it provides complete support for almost all standard shell features. With Vimshell, it's possible to run an entire Vim session inside of a single Vim buffer. It's really a very impressive patch. Unfortunately, it too has some limitations. At the present time, it does not work with Gvim, and it doesnt allow you to use Vim normal mode key shortcuts inside of shell buffers.
My experiments with Vimshell were all quite succesful. I hade some compilation issues at first, because AAP doesn't like patches that add new files. When I dumped the AAP build and grabbed a normal tarball, I was able to patch and build without any errors. All of my tests were successful and impressive: I was able to run ssh, ftp, Vim, top, bash, and even emacs flawlessly in individual vim buffers.
Tags: vim, programming, shell
Posted on 2005-02-271 comments
Did you figure out a way to actually move from buffer to buffer while in this shell? I have it patched and agree it's *far* superior to the other solutions out there, but couldn't figure out a CTRL-W command to say, while in the shell, "go to the next buffer" or "show me the next buffer". The other bummer about this patch is that it doesn't allow you to use VIM commands inside of the shell (e.g. I can't do visual mode to select some output from a MySQL query). Any thoughts on that?