TrueVimTerminal

About

TrueVimTerminal is a set of vim and bash/zsh plugins which allow you to use your terminal almost as though it were a normal buffer in vim.

Demo (TODO)

You can also run a demo by cloning and running demo (which also accepts -c)

Usage

1. Include each plugin in their respective .*rc
2. Set TVT_ESCAPE in your .{ba,z}shrc, which determines your 'escape to vim' bind
   Don't make it ^[ or you will have issues with special characters
   Things beginning with ^[, however, such as function keys, should be fine though
   Don't make it ^W, vim dislikes passing it through for terminal use already and using it as your escape character may break things
   If you are not using a sequence, check whether your desired combo will work using showkey -a
   You may have to set bind-tty-special-chars off in your .inputrc for some combos
   util/get_usable should print a list of usable combos with the above set
   Through .Xresources one can use combos otherwise unavailable, as in this example mapping ^^[ (which doesn't exist) to ^K:

*VT100*translations: #override \n\
    Ctrl <Key>Escape: string(0x0b)

3. Set g:TrueVimTerm_prompt_regex in your .vimrc, which is a vim regular expression to match your prompt
   It is important to get this as specific as possible, having one too generic will cause very odd issues
   The default is just ^\S*\s*
4. Set shell as your shell It defaults to launching zsh if present
   I just make all of my window manager keybinds use xterm -e "shell -c \"commands\"" so that I can manually launch xterm and still get to a working shell when I break things

Customization

bash/zsh

• TVT_DELIMITER: The delimiter used when vim is sending text modification commands to the shell ASCII decimal code, defaults to 31 (unit separator)
• TVT_DRAW_SLEEP: How long to wait for the shell to draw In 10ms increments, defaults to 1
• TVT_REDRAW_SLEEP: How long to wait for vim to catch redraws In 10ms increments, defaults to 1

vim

• TrueVimTerm_Start(buf, new): Overloadable function used to set buffer variables for a better terminal experience and create buffer mappings
  buf contains the buffer number and new is a boolean representing whether the terminal buffer was just created (if it wasn't, normal mode mappings and most settings won't need to be re-set)
• TrueVimTerm_Start_User(buf, new): Should be called in TrueVimTerm_Start overloads, used to define user customization without removing the defaults
• TrueVimTerm_Mappings(): Overloadable function used to create default mappings
• TrueVimTerm_Mappings_User(): Should be called in TrueVimTerm_Start overloads, used to define user mappings without removing the defaults

Paste

There are two functions, Tapi_TVT_Paste and Tapi_TVT_NoPaste, which are used to enter an entirely passthrough state. The former removes all terminal job mode mappings, and the latter calls TrueVimTerm_Start with new=0. These are automatically called upon entering a nested vim session.
Here are some handy aliases to allow you to call them manually:

alias Paste='printf "\033]51;[\"call\",\"Tapi_TVT_Paste\",[]]\007"'
alias NoPaste='printf "\033]51;[\"call\",\"Tapi_TVT_NoPaste\",[]]\007"'