12738 vim jobs never more
I use vim on the terminal, but I face a problem from old ages. I never remember if I have a vim running or not. When I’m using vim and want to run a command I send it to foreground run the command and use fg to get back to vim. But the problem is that sometimes I forgot to use fg and end up with logs of vims running in background.
Emacs has a server mode that deals with this kind of problem but with a more hardcore approach. What I want were much much simpler.
I want that, if I already have a vim running in this terminal as a job, the vim command brings this up to foreground instead of starting a new vim. So I can run vim as much times as I want and still have only a single vim really running.
To do this I create a little python script that read the output of jobs
and tell what to do next. If there is a vim job running it will output
fg %n where n is a number telling us what job to bring
to foregroumd. Now, if there are no vim jobs it output /usr/bin/env vim.
So that jobs | ./fg_jobs.py always expand to fg %n or /usr/bin/env vim.
So far so good, now we can use this to create a alias for vim like this
alias vim='eval $(jobs | ~/.local/bin/fg_jobs.py)'
And voila, vim will always reuse the same vim instance again. It’s a kind
of memoised command. Cool uh?
This is the python script:
I may rewrite this to something simpler,
Installing:
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dhilst/22eaf6089cc35fb8d43b4a49b680a5a4/raw/85a273391da614c3c10497e0b51668fc2828060d/gistfile1.txt -O ~/.local/bin/fg_jobs.py
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/fg_jobs.py
Cheers!