session detach / reattach, like screen/tmux

[joshtriplett]

With nvim's terminal mode, if it had the ability to detach and reattach, it could serve as a replacement for screen or tmux.

This would require a few additional bits:

• A :detach function, to stop running the text UI and daemonize into a --headless instance that will survive the current user session ending.
• A command-line argument to list running nvim instances.
• Command-line arguments to attach to a running nvim instance and start the text UI. These need three variations: one that just fails if the session already has an attached text UI, one that detaches any attached text UI first (like screen -D -R), and one that attaches without detaching any other attached text UI (like screen -x). (That last one is optional, but I'd find it quite useful.)

cc @jameysharp

[justinmk]

See #2706 (comment)

[gsf]

A lightweight way to do this at present that's working well for me is to let abduco handle the session management:

abduco -A nvim-session nvim

[lf-]

I'm currently using dtach for this: dtach -A /tmp/nvim-sess -ze '^q' -r ctrl_l nvim, but obviously I'm interested in this happening.

[justinmk]

reference for daemonize procedure:

• http://software.clapper.org/daemonize/
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/3095624/

[rashil2000]

Are there any plans for this? I use Neovim on Windows, but Windows lacks any terminal multiplexers (tmux works only in Msys2/Cygwin and that too only in mintty terminal).

Splits/panes etc. for shells works fine, but Neovim is obviously missing the main tmux feature that is attach/detach.

[aleksandersumowski]

@rashil2000 have you tried https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html?

[hoschi]

@rashil2000 original Veonim had that feature as well, here is a fork of it https://github.com/smolck/uivonim
I don't know if there is another client implemented it which supports Windows.

[hoschi]

@rashil2000
my point was that this feature is already implemented in core, but not in the TUI. Neovim is already split up into server/client. In a few works the TUI delivered by core spawns and connects to one Neovim instance. What you miss here is the ability to manage different servers, which is not implemented in TUI.
Veonim implemented the server management. Unfortunately the original repository went away, here is a deep link to the functionality you want from my personal fork: https://github.com/hoschi/veonim/blob/master/docs/readme.md#multiple-concurrent-neovim-instances
I guessed, but not researched, that the fork I posted has the same functionality and you can find it by reading the docs.

In general, I just suggested searching for a client which implements the management of multiple Neovim instances ... which runs on Windows. A starting point would be the wiki which lists different clients.

[Benjamin-Davies]

Neovide has recently gained support for connecting to a remote Neovim instance over TCP (as detailed in the README). However, I don't think it's in the stable release, so you might have to build from source.

[rashil2000]

@Benjamin-Davies Wow, that looks interesting, will try building from source to check it out.

[lucc]

@rashil2000 there is the pr #8246 but it stalled for a long time now. I think that might be what you want.

[rashil2000]

There is actually another one on similar lines #10071, which allows the TUI to connect to a headless nvim server. While not exactly same as attaching/detaching, it will allow us to connect similarly to tmux servers (which can be listed by, for example tmux ls).

[nawordar]

This would be even more useful, if all instances could see the same opened buffers as it is possible with Emacs. This is something I miss from Emacs, as it allowed to use i3wm for managing window layout

[bfredl]

There's also https://github.com/martanne/abduco for just the session management part (which can be combined with nvim for the multiplexing part)

[rashil2000]

(which unfortunately doesn't work on Windows)