Run Interactive

Run Interactive is a Vim plugin for selectively running commands via an interactive shell. This allows you to take advantage of custom functions, aliases, etc that are configured via your login shell scripts.

Vim supports treating the shell as an interactive shell, but this has performance and maintenance concerns. This plugin allows for temporarily setting Vim to use an interactive shell, then returns to default non-interactive configuration after executing the specified command.

It provides a single command, RunInInteractiveShell, which allows you to run a command via an interactive shell. For instance, assume you have a a git alias called update defined in your ~/.gitconfig. By default you would not be able to run this command from within Vim, but with this plugin you can run it via:

:RunInInteractiveShell git update

Installation

Install with Vundle by adding the following line to your vimrc:

Bundle 'christoomey/vim-run-interactive'

And then run the :BundleInstall command from within Vim.

Usage

The main interface to the plugin is via the command, RunInInteractiveShell. This is obviously a bit of a mouthful, so a mapping like the following is recommended:

" Add this to your vimrc to provide a shortcut
nnoremap <leader>ri :RunInInteractiveShell<space>

Assuming you are using , as you leader, then you can type ,ri in normal mode and the command name will be populated for you along with a trailing space. You can then enter your desired shell command and hit enter to run it.