is it possible to have one universal window for all tabs in vim?
For example if I have a preview window open, that this window is the same for all the tabs, including its position and so on?
Short answer: not really.
Long answer: NERDTree fights against this and is far more complex for trying to do so.
From a comment:
The purpose of each tab is to allow for a different window layout.
In other words, I’ve seen people try to bolt this onto vim, and it’s kludgy, only half works, and frankly goes so against the grain of what vim tries to be that it becomes a sacrifice of productivity.
If you absolutely must, see if you can figure out how NERDTree makes it work. I’ll see about digging up the QA on vi.stackexchange.com.
So I'm trying to demo vim, but no one can see the keys i'm pressing. Is there a way to have it show the last string of commands?
Like...this being displayed in the corner.
<esc>v:28yyGpi
some text
<esc><ctrl><shift>c10jllI
more text...
ect...
If worse comes to worse I could probably make something, But I had hoped there was some built in function.
Don't use Vim itself for that, use an external program like KeyCastr on Mac OS X, QiPress on Windows or key-mon on Linux. There are many others so make sure you review them all before choosing one of the above.
I am aware that the mousefocus option is only supposed to work in gVim. But I was wondering, if it's possible to have the console Vim switch to different windows in response to mouse clicks, would it be not possible to easily add following mouse movement to it, too?
I'm an xmonad user, I love the focus following the pointer feature, I do a lot of pdf viewing and browsing while writing in Vim, and I'd be so much happier if I didn't have to keep mentally switching back and forth between two different types of focus changing.
If that's completely not possible, I guess opening new Vim windows (as with :split) in new instances of the terminal is no easier to do?
It would not be at all simple to add this. Using the mouse within the terminal works by vim sending control codes to the terminal requesting that mouse actions be sent as part of the input stream. Terminals only report clicks not changes in the pointer position, so vim has no way of knowing where the mouse is.
With major changes it would likely be possible for a vim with X support to get pointer activity directly from the X server, but that would likely be reported by pixel rather than by character so further work would need to be done before it could determine which vim window is currently under the pointer.
set mouse=a
should do the trick but it will probably depend on your terminal emulator. See :help 'mouse'.
This works for Windows 7/Cygwin 32bit mintty/vim 7.3: (I DO NOT use gvim!)
Having installed this: http://ehiti.de/katmouse/, I can scroll the window under my cursor without having to have clicked to select a window, click-selecting of single vim-windows works, too. It does not pull the vim window to the foreground, if another window overlaps it, if that is what you desire. Still it can be scrolled without click-selecting it first.
So:
Check if there exists a software paket for your distribution, that implements your desired mouse behavior on the OS level. When this works for my self-compiled vim in cygwin, it might very well work with console vim on linux, too.
This post here serves as evidence, that it is possible at all, that is the reason this was not made a comment. When I am on linux again I will investigate this further and update this post, but that might take a while.
On set mouse=a: The vim help states you a need a terminal capable of handling mouse inputs, further information can be found here. :help ttymouse might also be helpful, i.e. if you have a xterm-compliant console, but :help term is set to something else.
UPDATE: (Freshly installed Fedora 19 with packages, no self-compiled stuff.)
Fedora 19 + se mouse=a = scrolling in single console vim window with several buffers opened next to each other independently works, too. Window manager used is LXDE.
I'm trying figure out how far I can go in fine-tuning the appearance of my Vim GUI. I'm using MacVim 7.3 and what I'd like to do is change the padding, text-alignment and border color of the line numbers.
I know there are some standard configuration parameters in the highlight command, particularly the gui group, but what if I want something beyond what's offered there? For example, a right border as opposed to underline. Is this possible?
It could be that it's simply not worth the trouble, but I'd like to at least know what the initial steps would be so I can make the call. (Even if it's just :help adding-border-to-line-numbers and I happened to miss it).
Thanks.
No, unless you intend to go into vim's source and hack it from there, changing line numbers appearance beyond what highlighting offers is not possible.
However, I do remember a few patches that dealt with something of a kind, so you might want to check the archives. You will still need to recompile vim doing that (if you manage to find a patch that does that).
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Background
I'm building an application where it detects what documents you're using from the file system. To do this it must access the AXDocument attribute of the active window. MacVim provides this. Running Vim in the Terminal wouldn't provide this.
I've just put out a survey to ask what editor coders who are interested in my app use. A significant number of the folk using Vim used it directly from the command line.
Why not use a GUI Vim?
Why do some people prefer to run Vim this way versus a GUI implementation like MacVim?
What advantages does this offer? As I understand it, you can send files to MacVim from the command line just as easily as command line Vim.
These reasons may be different for each specific developer but my guess would be:
vim is pretty much vim on any platform. GUI implementations can
vary.
Familiarity - being familiar with vim does not nessecarily mean
being familar with vim wrapped ina
GUI - espectially given #1.
"Elite Complex" ;-)
No definite avantages to the users over cli vim.
One might not have access to a gui (think ssh) or simply force of habit.
Although I don't use any feature exclusive to the GUI version (never touch the mouse while editing) I find GVIM more pleasing to the eye for fonts rendering and color management. So the only reason to use the cli version is not having access to a graphic environment (like when accessing a remote machine via ssh). Using GVIM also allows reuse of the terminal it was called from without having to use screen.
being able to run vim under screen provides
reliability: it will stay alive if X or the terminal app crashes. not sure how applicable this is to the Mac.
the option to multiplex sessions within terminal tabs. I actually end up rarely using terminal tabs because of this. It's possible (albeit a bit confusing) to set up heirarchical screen sessions and move branches of them around. screen is super awesome. This also provides an additional layer of text buffering in which you can search by regexp — this is useful if you spawn a shell command that is pages long and you're looking for a particular word in there.
the ability to connect to an existing session from another computer or reconnect after a network outage
and friends
in addition to making it possible to use screen, the console vim provides better shell integration. Although it's possible to run shell commands from within gvim (again, I'm not sure how this applies to the Mac, I'm a linux guy), there are limitations. I rarely use a gui vim so I'm not sure about the exact limits. For example, ANSI color codes are removed. I find this annoying because I tend to interact with SCM that way, for example running :!git diff --cached to check the changes in the index before committing. It makes for a somewhat quicker and more satisfying (mmm, diffy!) read if it's colourized.
I used to feel that gvim was a big improvement for viewing diffs, but I've changed the background colour of my terminal to a dark non-black shade, and set
:highlight DiffAdd ctermbg=Black
:highlight DiffChange ctermbg=Black
:highlight DiffDelete ctermbg=Black
:highlight DiffText cterm=Bold ctermbg=None
The result of this is that in diff mode, differing text shows up with a black background, and unchanged text is coloured with the terminal background colour. For side-by-side diffs, this works wonderfully, since you can tell immediately based on the other side whether a given line is a change or add; for non-side-by-side you will be able to see an unchanged part in a changed line.
This means that you can leave syntax colouring on and still be able to see diffs. Again, you do need to be able to set the background colour of the terminal to a unique, dark, non-black shade. This facility is available in the terminal emulators that I use (yakuake/konsole and roxterm) and many others.^[?Mac^M"mya)^O^Op
This also assumes that you're using a colourscheme meant for use with a dark background colour; I use a modified delek.
Although I haven't tried this, there is also the option to run console vim in 256-colour mode on terminals which support that mode — which I believe includes most or all modern ones. This can serve to make much of the subtlety of GUI colorschemes available to console vim.^["mp
I also like it that it lives in the place where it was started, and starts up quick. So if I'm navigating around in the shell, as per my wont, I can edit a file without interrupting that flow or having to farm that operation out to a different piece of conceptual real estate. Having less things to keep track of is a big plus. Being able to background it is helpful, too, for example if I need to grab the contents of an unexported shell variable via xclip. If I'd spawned a GUI window instead I might have some trouble remembering where that shell was, or might have already closed it.
My main reason for using a gui vim at all is that it makes somewhat more sense as something spawned from a gui app, eg a browser. In practice I never do this, and I suspect that it's fairly equivalent to just have a new terminal window pop up with a new console vim in it. Though there is likely some (window manager) window management functionality that is exclusive to gui implementations. This is pretty similar to the use case you're discussing.
gvim is actually just a basic terminal emulator with vim running in it, and some menus and toolbar buttons up the top.
So if you have a good, full-featured terminal emulator already, you may as well use that instead, since you'll be using the same type of terminal window that you are familiar with across all your terminal sessions.
Another benefit is that it makes it easy to switch to a shell inside vim and then switch out seamlessly.
On Windows I prefer gvim. On Linux it's vim inside gnome-terminal, which is nice and configurable thankyou.
To avoid (or at least minimize) the use of the mouse.
some gvim variations can't handle
some of my hotkeys
some spawn separate window when i try
to compile program
sometimes they simply can't use fonts
like fixed or terminus correctly
(think about "terminus bold" - some
gvim variations simply stretch
"terminus normal" instead of
rendering with the separate font)
cli generally works faster than gui,
especially if running in real
textmode console (not possible on a
mac though)
there are almost no benefits in using
GUI version, and i'd loose ability to
run in screen, ssh, to suspend
process with ctrl+z, and many more.
The main reason I use the command line is that I spend most of my day in a terminal already, and my use of vim reflects this. I do not open up vim for a long while just editing different files then opening others without closing it; I usually open a file or two do a few edits then do some command line tasks, maybe change a directory, and open up vim somewhere else. When using the a gui there is substantial lag when opening the editor. This wouldn't bother me if I opened it once and left it open but I tend to not work that way. So the command line works better for my workflow. Furthermore since there is no real benefit feature-wise of the GUI over the command line and vise-versa, I've always just stuck with the command line since it suited me better.
vim is way more performant with huge files (100-500MB .csv or .xml files in my case).
gvim beats vim hands-down when used to compare files (gvimdiff): setting the font (want more content on the screen?), dragging the window split line (want to see more of one file rather than the other) etc.
Other than that, I haven't seen other mayor differences and use gvim except when working with large files because I find it more handy in a graphical environment (gnome).
Speed of rendering
proper shell integration with
suspend (C-z),
alternate terminal,
uniform copy/paste
nicer quickfix integration (all external programs run inside your terminal, instead of popup windows... )
network agnostic: can run over ssh
using GNU screen, can detach/attach session over internet;
To the sometimes mentioned 'downside':
mouse support is up to par with :se mouse +=a; this enables selection, window border dragging with the mouse, even over GNU screen over ssh
Pair coding via vim + gnu screen is the selling point for me. I work in screen/vim all day, it allows people to remote into my screen session and we can both edit files fluidly. It's so hot right now.
As a big vim user myself, although I know about GUI vims, I don't use them just out of habit.
I've been using vi since 1990, switched to vim a few years ago but still call it through an alias (alias vi=vim).
For me its just habit. vim works well as it is. Perhaps the gui offers more and I should explore it, but vim works just the way I expect it to and want it to.