如何防止vim bash命令使用全屏？

Question

When I execute a bash command from inside a vim window, the results of the command take up the whole screen and the code disappears. I would like the results of the command to only take up the screen space that it needs. Is this possible? To clarify I am using the command

:!echo "my command"

I'm familiar with multiple terminal windows, tmux, and iterm. I really just want to be able to do it in a vim window without extra plugins if possible.

Answer 1

Vim switches the terminal back to the original screen (where you started it from); Vim itself uses the alternate screen to display its UI without a terminal scrollbar and without affecting the original contents. There's no way around that implementation detail.

You could use GVIM; as that one doesn't run in a terminal, it comes with its own (crude) terminal emulation, and that one just appends output at the command-line location; the original window contents just scroll out of the view to make space for the shell command output. Even with that, you cannot do any interactions while the output is being displayed; once you acknowledge the prompt, the output is gone.

In the terminal, you've already mentioned the possible alternatives. The straightforward solution would be to split the terminal window via screen or tmux , and then have Vim run in one and the shell commands in the other window. The big advantage here is that you can work on both in parallel and switch back and forth.

Starting with Vim 8.1, Vim has basic terminal multiplexing built-in; ie you can start a terminal in a Vim window with :terminal and then switch inside Vim using the default window commands.

For Vim 7, without using external terminal multiplexers, all you can do is capturing the shell command's output inside a scratch buffer:

:new | 0read !{bash-command}

This is the basic recipe; you can extend that with scratch buffer naming, automatic buffer deletion on close, and so on. See this Vim Tips Wiki page for details.

This works well for non-interactive commands that don't take a long time to execute; you don't see live output nor what input you type.