Allow the use of external terminals. about vlime

[l04m33]

I see that working with Vlime in a small terminal is irritating, because of all those split windows, but I'm not sure I grasped the solution you propose. Do you mean something like vim-slime?

Vlime's buffer management is indeed a bit chaotic at the moment. Some special buffers are still lying around after it's window was closed. Hopefully I can fix this soon.

[benrob0329]

I mean like, have the option of using the REPL from a real terminal emulator (be it URXVT, Gnome-Termninal, or GNU Screen if need be) by using the REPL that is already opened (or launched from Vim).

Example environment:

[l04m33]

I'm sorry but I still don't get it 😅. If you just want to run the server in a separate terminal, Vlime can already do that. That's exactly what you showed in your screenshot.

To avoid confusion, can you describe your desired workflow by listing steps, and stress on the difference with Vlime's current workflow? For example, if I would like the REPL be launched in a separate terminal, I'd do this:

1. Start the server in a separate terminal by loading start-vlime.lisp.
2. Launch Vim in another terminal, and connect to the server, by pressing \cc or calling vlime#plugin#ConnectREPL('127.0.0.1', 7002).
3. Send expressions to the REPL and read results from inside Vim.

[benrob0329]

Its 3 that I'd like to change, and have everything be done in the other terminal, rather than in a buffer.

[l04m33]

Ah, I see. Vlime kept everything in the buffers to make them available for further manipulation, e.g. copying and inspecting the results. I think a separate terminal can't provide decent UI for these tasks.

Currently the closest thing Vlime can do, is to use a vertical REPL window, by adding these to your vimrc (see :help g:vlime_window_settings):

let g:vlime_window_settings = {'repl': {'vertical': v:true, 'pos': 'botright'}}

If that's not what you want either, I think vim-slime may be a better tool for you.

[benrob0329]

Perhaps leaving the standard io in the terminal and having debugging etc in Vim would be a good mix. This would allow things that need editor integration to have them, but allow full TUIs to have a proper terminal.

[l04m33]

Vim recently introduced a full-featured embedded terminal, and Neovim already had this feature for some time, so I'm considering using the embedded terminal for launching the Vlime server. I think this will solve most of your problems. The Vim :terminal implementation is not quite stable at the moment though.

[l04m33]

I added a new option to instruct Vlime to use the built-in terminal emulators in both Vim and Neovim. Please refer to :help g:vlime_cl_use_terminal. If you're using Vim, this needs the recently-added +terminal feature.

[l04m33]

I'm closing this issue. Please feel free to re-open it for further discussion.