detach the current TUI (nvim continues headlessly)

[eloytoro]

Problem

When connected to a remote ui executing :q will close the remote server, I guess this makes sense in the way that the command is being run by the backend and not the UI, but it's not intuitive or desired, I wish to quit without killing the backend

Steps to reproduce

nvim --listen 127.0.0.1:8888 --headless
nvim --server 127.0.0.1:8888 --remote-ui
:q

Expected behavior

The UI should disconnect from the server but not to kill it

Neovim version (nvim -v)

0.10.x

Vim (not Nvim) behaves the same?

no

Operating system/version

macOS 13.2.1

Terminal name/version

iTerm

$TERM environment variable

xterm-256color

Installation

homebrew

[zeertzjq]

I don't think this should be changed.

[erw7]

I don't think this should be changed.

I don't think we should try to detach the tui with :q, but a way to detach the current tui should be implemented.

Even now, it is possible to terminate only tui by using call chanclose(id) with the channel id obtained by echo nvim_list_uis() as an argument. However, it is not easy to use because users need to remember the correspondence between tui and channel id.

To begin with, #18375 has the following disadvantages,

• Increased memory usage
• Startup time is increased by the amount of child processes that need to be forked
• Lots of bugs ;-<

so it is unlikely to be beneficial to users unless it is used as follows

nohup nvim --listen /tmp/nvim.pipe --headless > /dev/null 2>&1 0< /dev/null &!
nvim --server /tmp/nvim.pipe --remote-ui

In that case, we would love to have this feature.

[mikesmithgh]

I don't think this should be changed.

I don't think we should try to detach the tui with :q, but a way to detach the current tui should be implemented.

Even now, it is possible to terminate only tui by using call chanclose(id) with the channel id obtained by echo nvim_list_uis() as an argument. However, it is not easy to use because users need to remember the correspondence between tui and channel id.

To begin with, #18375 has the following disadvantages,

• Increased memory usage
• Startup time is increased by the amount of child processes that need to be forked
• Lots of bugs ;-<

so it is unlikely to be beneficial to users unless it is used as follows

nohup nvim --listen /tmp/nvim.pipe --headless > /dev/null 2>&1 0< /dev/null &!
nvim --server /tmp/nvim.pipe --remote-ui

In that case, we would love to have this feature.

Thanks for the info. I came up with a function to disconnect all remote-ui sessions:

  vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>q', function()
    for _, ui in pairs(vim.api.nvim_list_uis()) do
      if ui.chan and not ui.stdout_tty then
        vim.fn.chanclose(ui.chan)
      end
    end
  end, { noremap = true })

This is working for my use case, but I am not 100% sure that ui.stdout_tty is the correct condition to check. But, if I use your nohup commands in combination with this I can have a long living neovim session. Hopefully this helps someone 🙂

[justinmk]

if the nvim_list_uis() returns more than one ui, how would I know which channel to close?

:help nvim_set_client_info()