si-vim

Keep a single instance of Vim running & attached to each interactive Zsh session. This enables you to switch back and forth between Vim and Zsh instantly.

Features

• automatically keep an instance of Vim running for each interactive Zsh session
• use siv or your own keybinding to go to Vim, use :sus[pend] (or a keybinding) to go back to Zsh
• open files from Zsh with siv, this will open Vim and
  • switch to the corresponding buffer if the file was already open, or
  • open the file in a new tab if it wasn't yet open
• automatically keep the working directory of Zsh & Vim in sync, i.e. whenever you change your directory in Zsh, the attached si-vim session will switch as well
• exiting zsh with ctrl-d will warn you in case you have unsaved changes in Vim and otherwise exit cleanly (you can disable this behavior by setting $SI_VIM_NO_CTRL_D before sourcing this plugin).
• disable/enable automatically keeping Vim open with siv-[en|dis]able or by setting/unsetting the environment variable $SI_VIM_DISABLED
• siv also supports running startup commands from arguments with the + prefix like Vim and will create all directories that don't exist for the given file path

Keybindings

I recommend setting a keybinding to switch back and forth between Zsh and Vim. To do this with ctrl-u, for example, add the following to your .zshrc

bindkey ^u _si_vim_widget

and to your .vimrc

nnoremap <C-u> :suspend<CR>

Furthermore, depending on how you usually exit Vim, you will probably want to reconfigure it to only close all buffers and suspend Vim instead of quitting it. I like doing this with ZZ, and keep the following in my .vimrc

nnoremap <S-z><S-z> :bufdo bw<CR>:sus<CR>

Installation

To use this plugin, simply source all .zsh files from this repo in your .zshrc, for example like this

for script in $(find '<path to this repo>' -name '*.zsh'); do
    source $script
done

and all .vim files in your .vimrc, for example like this

for f in glob($HOME . '<path to this repo>/**/*.vim', 0, 1)
    execute 'source ' . f
endfor

I do this by keeping this repository as a submodule in my dotfiles. If you want to do this, I recommend using my tool sdf to manage your dotfiles and their dependencies.