How to replace vim screen buffer with previous bash activity after quitting

bashvim

I'm trying to find out what a bash (or vim) feature is. Here's the scenario. I'm in a bash terminal, then edit something with vim, then exit back to bash. In some terminals, the vim session screen disappears to show the previous bash shell activity ( this is what I want? ).

In others, the vim session screen buffer remains (hiding old bash shell activity). I'll have to either clear the screen, or wait until my bash activity pushes that vim session buffer out of the screen.

How can I control this behaviour to replace vim session buffer with previous bash activity?

Thanks
Tim

Best Answer

Vim sends t_ti and t_ks to the terminal when a session is started and t_te and t_ke when it ends. The t_ti and t_te sequences cause the terminal to switch to its alternate screen.

In your ~/.vimrc file you can make vim leave the document on screen when it exits by including this line:

set t_ti=""

if you have a line similar to that, removing it should make the previous terminal contents appear when you exit vim.

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It's the GNU info system for documentation. To exit, hit q. To learn about it, enter info info

How to cause vim to copy text to GNU screen’s clipboard buffer

If some extra keystrokes do not bother you, I can‘t see a problem.

GNU Screen’s copy-paste register (.) can be read from / written to file out of a box: <C-a>< and <C-a>> are default hotkeys, /tmp/screen-exchange is a default file, but I’d prefer a user-specific rather than system-wide so I would set something like this in the .screenrc:

setenv BUFFERFILE "$HOME/.buffer" 
bufferfile "$BUFFERFILE"

Vim has no such commands out of a box, but there is no difficulty to create and map them to whatever you want, e. g. <leader>< and <leader>> respectively:

if exists("$BUFFERFILE")
    nnoremap <silent><leader>< :let @" = join(readfile($BUFFERFILE), "\n")<CR>
    nnoremap <silent><leader>> :call writefile( split(@", "\n"), $BUFFERFILE )<CR>
endif

If they do bother you however, it becomes a little more complicated – as far as understood, you have to:

remap all possible yank, cut (since there is no autocmd event at changing certain register) and paste (since it’s actually the only feasible trigger) shortcuts in Vim – nothing complex but tedious – I hope, you know how to do it;
remap two shortcuts in GNU Screen: while pasting one is quite obvious:
```
 bind ] eval readbuf "paste ."
```
yanking one – <Return> or <Space> in a special copying mode presents a difficulty to me.

Best Answer

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