Xterm, Vim, PyQt

Question

I have a PyQt application where it spawns an XTerm window in a widget. The XTerm window is launched with -e vim <file> which immediately runs Vim displaying the file for edit, etc.

When I hit : w ! in Vim, I'd like to somehow catch that event and echo it back to XTerm, and/or ultimately back to PyQt, so that I can modify another UI element.

I do know how to use a Vim autocmd to catch : w ! (BufWritePost) and execute a shell script,etc...

...but I think I need to have Vim echo back, either with simple ASCII text or via a SIGNAL, back to the XTerm window and hopefully back to the QProcess.

So I think the key is figuring how to tell XTerm to do this, but I'm a bit stumped and open to any and all suggestions about how to accomplish.
Thanks to all in advance.

Answer 1

Your script would have to take into account that XTerm will not do the echoing (text echoed/printed in the terminal goes to the terminal's screen). Your script would have to either make vim echo something to a file, or run vim (in xterm) from a helper script that would pass the information back in a file.

Usually this is done by allocating a temporary file in the parent process (your PyQt application), and passing its name to the child process.