Using Cygwin, I tried creating and editing a file in Vim:
touch test | vim
This is obviously a mistake; something like vim "$(touch test)" has a better chance of actually working. Nevertheless, this command throws the error:
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal.
And after this, Vim opens and I exit the program with :q. Any subsequent commands I enter into the terminal are hidden from view until I restart Cygwin.
Why is this?
You don't understand what does a pipe | do in shell.
Pipe will take the pervious command's stdout as stdin to next command, in a subshell.
Your touch foo doesn't generate any output, what do you expect to happen? same for vim "$(touch test)".
If you want to create a file and open it in vim in one shot, you can try:
touch foo && vim foo
If you want to edit it with vim anyway, actually, you can simply just:
vim foo
then save the buffer after your editing.
Related
I'm trying to run an unsaved buffer in a shell command and have a history of the output
console.log("test")
Then, :w !node does what is expected, test is outputted, but once I click enter, the output disappears, and doesn't even show in :messages:
How can I find it?
If you open a Vim buffer and type in one or more shell commands each on "his" own line. Like:
ls /home
ls /root
Then you can type the command:
:%!bash
and not only will it run the commands on each line one after the other, it will also overwrite the buffer with the output of each command in chronological order, then you can do whatever you want with it :-)
I hope it was helpful :)
BTW: if you want to run a command in Vim and get the output in your buffer, then you can just double tap the exclamation mark in NORMAL MODE and the command line in the bottom will show
:.!
then you just type in your command and press enter. :)
easy peachy lemon squeeze :)
note: I learned that last one by mistake
What :w !cmd does it pipes your current buffer contents into cmd's stdin. When you don't need this you should simply execute :!cmd instead.
:messages serve to show an important log data printed by specially dedicated :echom[sg] command, not some random stuff from terminal windows. So the output from "node" process will not and should not ever get there.
You can put the process' stdout into the current buffer by using :r[ead] command, e.g.
:r !node
I know little about Vim in terminal(Mac) and the other day I was working copy and pasting text and i think I accidently did it when in terminal. Now whenever I open terminal it instantly loads on Vim Ex mode. I know how to quit Ex mode once in terminal but is there any way i can get rid of Vim loading when I open Terminal?
Thanks
Edit: To explain further to what i mean when I open terminal.app from Utilities I get the following
and the only way I get back to the command prompt is by typing quit every time I open terminal and i cant understand why the Vim process is running in the first place.
I was just outside the terminal in a document copy and pasting text then accidentally did a command v to paste within terminal which resulted in this happening.
It appears that you've accidentally updated one of your shell startup scripts so it launches vim.
If your default shell is csh or tcsh, take a look at .cshrc, .tcshrc, and .login in your home directory, and look for a command like vi -e or vim -e.
If your default shell is bash, check .bashrc and .bash_profile.
It may be easier to figure out which file you messed up by checking which file in your home directory was modified most recently:
% ls -altr $HOME | tail
-a lists all files, including files whose names start with ..
-l gives you a long listing, showing timestamps.
-t sorts by modification time.
-r reverses the order, so newer files are shown last
I want to use the Vim to see the result of history (not in the shell). I think history | vim will work (use the result of history as the input of vim), but it returns with:
$history | vim
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
Vim: Error reading input, exiting...
Vim: Finished.
Can anybody explain this?
By piping into vim, you are changing the standard input stream. Because vim is an interactive program, it requires the standard input to be the console.
If you want to view in vim, you should tell it you are reading the file from stdin (by supplying the argument -):
history | vim -
Alternatively, you could just use more or less:
history | more
history | less
These latter two are preferable. If you pipe into vim, it will see your "file" as having modifications, and so you can't quit with a straight :q command. Instead you have to force quit by :q!, which is a bit clunky.
On the other hand, you can exit more or less just by typing q. Have a look at the man-page for these two programs. You'll use them a lot.
As recommended by Russell Silva in the comments, you can open vim in read-only mode when you read from stdin. Just supply the -R argument. Then you can quit normally without needing the override:
history | vim -R -
Apart of vim -, you may try bash command substitution like:
vim <(history)
See also:
How to write whole buffer to standard output from the command line? at Vim SE
How to edit files non-interactively (e.g. in pipeline)? at Vim SE
This happend to me trying to send it to background console (&)
One script used:
...
vi "$file" &
...
# change to just:
vi "$file"
removing &, problem went away.
In vim, type :sh will switch to shell, and exit can exit the shell and get back to vim. Is there any command to check if it's in vim shell mode? So that I won't accidentally vim to open the same file again. I want to avoid below scenario:
vim myfile > :sh > exit > vim myfile // get warning of another vim instance is editing the same file
These are the normal scenario:
vim myfile > :sh > exit // keep editing
vim myfile > :wq > vim myfile // keep editing
In addition to #a3nm answer, what you can do is
use pstree -h: it will output process tree with current branch highligted and all you need to check is whether there is vim in the highlight.
Another possibility is ps t: it will show all processes using the current terminal and should show vim in a list when you are inside :sh. ps -oargs t may be more useful in case you want to know arguments you ran vim with.
These methods are more reliable because VIMRUNTIME, VIM and MYVIMRC environment variables may be overrided by you in order to do some customizations (BTW, they are defined by vim for use in vimscripts, not by :sh). They also work for other processes that allow you to run a subshell, but do not define any environment variables.
I would also suggest to consider using <C-z> in normal mode or :suspend/:stop in Ex because these use shell vim was launched from instead of creating new. This behavior gives you access to history of commands you typed before running vim and also makes you able to write more complex and time-consuming shell configuration without needing to wait every time.
In case you use <C-z> both methods still work, but first method won’t highlight vim because it will be at the same level (has the same parent) as pstree itself, likely just below or above pstree in graph. This also enables third method: jobs shell builtin.
In order to restore from <C-z> you should use fg (a single % in zsh and bash also works) which is less to type then exit (but more then <C-d>).
The :sh command in vim seems to define the VIMRUNTIME, VIM and MYVIMRC environment variables, so you can just check if they are defined. To do so, you can run echo $VIM, for instance, which should return an empty line in a normal shell and something like /usr/share/vim in a shell run from vim.
I would like my tcsh script to launch an editor (e.g., vi, emacs):
#!/bin/tcsh
vi my_file
This starts up vi with my_file but first displays a warning "Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal" and my keystrokes don't appear on the screen. After I kill vi, my terminal window is messed up (no newlines), requiring a "reset". I tried "emacs -nw", "xemacs -nw", and pico with similar results. "xemacs" works but launches a separate window. I want to reuse the same terminal window.
Is there a way to launch an editor from a script so that it reuses the same terminal window?
I answered my own question! You have to redirect terminal input and output:
#!/bin/tcsh
vi my_file < `tty` > `tty`
The reason you're getting the error is that when you start a shell in your environment, it's starting in a subshell that has STDIN and STDOUT not connected to a TTY — probably because this is in something like a pipeline. When you redirect, you're opening a new connection directly to the device. So, for example, your command line turns
$ vi < `tty` > `tty`
into
$ vi < /dev/ttys000 > /dev/ttys000
So you're not really using your old STDIN/STDOUT, you're creating two new files and mapping them to your vi process's STDIN/STDOUT.
Now, tell us what you're doing with this and we'll tell you how to avoid this kludge.
I wanted to do something similar. I wanted an alias that would find the last file I was working on, and open it in vi(1) for editing. Anyway, I couldn't figure out how to do it as a readable alias (in tcsh) so I just created an ugly shell script (csh because I'm old) instead:
#!/bin/csh
set DIR = "~/www/TooMuchRock/shows/"
set file = $DIR`ls -t $DIR | head -1`
set tty = `tty`
vi $file <$tty >$tty
(1) kraftwerk:bin> which vi
vi: aliased to /usr/local/bin/vim -u ~/.exrc
Absolutely. :-)
Write your script and have it call the EDITOR environment variable, which you will have set to "emacsclient". Then start up Emacs, execute M-x server-start, switch to a shell buffer (M-x shell) and execute your script. Emacsclient will pop up the thing to be edited and C-x # will act as a "done" command and take you back to your script with edits completed or aborted, as you choose.
Enjoy.
Edit: I meant to add that these days Emacs IS my terminal program. I have dozens of shell buffers and never have to worry about losing output and can use all the power of Emacs to manipulate and analyse the terminal output. And have Emacs scripts generate input to the shells. Awesome actually. For example, watching Tomcat output scroll by in a shell buffer while editing sources or processing mail or doing most any Emacs thing is very convenient. When a Tomcat stack trace appears I can quickly respond to it.
Had the same trouble with 'pinfo' in a shell script 'while' loop. The line can be used in the script, it uses 'ps' to find the tty of the current process number, "$$", and stores that tty in $KEY_TTY:
KEY_TTY=/dev/`ps | grep $$ | tr -s '[:blank:]' | cut -d " " -f 3`
Later in the script, just call the tty-only proggie, with $KEY_TTY as input, in my case it was:
pinfo -m $s $page < $KEY_TTY
For 'vi' it'd be:
vi $a < $KEY_TTY > $KEY_TTY
The advantage is that the script as a whole can still accept STDIN input, and 'vi' (or whatever) should work fine -- without having to remember to set any environmental variables before running the script.
Set your terminal tty to a variable, and then redirect the editor i/o through that variable.
In your script:
#!/bin/sh
ls | while read a; do vi $a < $MYTTY >$MYTTY; done
And then execute the script with:
$ MYTTY=`tty` ./myscript >/tmp/log
I was able to get the desired behavior under bash+Cygwin+Terminator:
#!/bin/bash
vim foo
Run the script, vim loads, no error messages, behaves as normal. There are undoubtedly dozens of variations between our setups, however, so I can't hazard a guess as to what makes the difference. I'm curious what it is, but you got it working, which is the important part.