Hacker News Reader

Comment by sojournerc | Hacker News Reader

what got me to switch was being able to run terminal commands in a buffer...

https://neovim.io/doc/user/nvim_terminal_emulator.html

I don't use it that often (I just open up another terminal), but you can also use ^Z to put vi in the background. It would be more useful if I didn't always forget and open up a new vi which would refuse to write to the file :)

I honestly do both. When I'm running something I want the output from (some to yank), I'll run in a buffer.

If doing file manipulation, CLI, etc. etc. I'll ctrl-z out.

I do the opposite of you pretty often too, always trying to `fg` a non-existent vim

Hmmm. I hadn't thought about being able to yank output from a command... That's a really good point. (Honestly I would probably use 'xsel -bi' and ':r !xsel -bo', but that's pretty ugly.)

Serious question: why not just open another terminal?

The integration is nice, it behaves as a normal buffer. So you can use all the standard modes and motions, splits, copy output to another buffer easier etc.

But modern terminals can do all that, with an editing mode that is tailored to terminal use rather than editing text.

Sorry I just don't understand why I'd want to use a text editor as my command line.

They can't though, a modern terminal cannot behave as a vim buffer. You can't have 25% of your terminal as a shell and the other 75% vim, they can't split like that. I'm not aware of any terminal that allows integration with vim registers or use vim motions.

You can use it as a normal buffer. Run command, switch to visual, go copy and paste. Way nicer than `:r !command`.

You can use :terminal in vim.

it's optional for the build: https://vimhelp.org/terminal.txt.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com