vim-slime should ask for a socket path, not a socket name

[thejohnfreeman]

tmux supports two ways to pick the session's socket from the command line:

-L : User passes a name of a socket that exists in $TMPDIR
-S : User passes an absolute path to a socket

On shared hosts, it is not safe to have tmux putting its sockets into the default value for $TMPDIR, /tmp, because they are likely to be blown away. However, it is often undesirable to set $TMPDIR to a path in the home directory because other processes can fill it up with garbage. tmux switched to a separate variable, $TMUX_TMPDIR, but not until recently, some time after the latest version in use at my company (1.8). Altogether, it makes the use of -L very hard to get right. For example, vim-slime simply cannot function when I use 1.8, keep my tmux socket in my home directory on a shared machine, but leave $TMPDIR unset or pointing at /tmp.

To get around this issue, I think it would be better if vim-slime asked for a full path to the socket and used -S internally. This will require plugin users to type more than a socket name, but I imagine the vast majority of users are sending snippets to the same session, not a different session. The current session's socket path is kept in $TMUX and can be parsed in vim with split($TMUX, ',')[0]. It can be used as the default path and fit the needs of most users ¹. I have made this improvement before for vim-tmux-navigator. I will be happy to volunteer a patch this evening, but it will be your decision whether to accept it.

Footnotes

1. I honestly suspect it will fit the need of every user, and thus the prompt can be removed entirely, but I might be wrong. ↩

[jpalardy]

I commented on the PR.

I'm not quick sure what the right solution is…