Shell – How to make shell aliases available when shelling out from Vim

aliasenvironment-variablesshellvim

In my .zshrc, I declare some aliases. Eg, which dbstart shows the contents of that alias.

If I open vim from that shell, it is a child process. In Vim, I can run shell commands with :! some_command. If I do :! echo $0 to see what shell Vim is using, it outputs '/bin/zsh'. However, my aliases are unavailable there.

How can I make my normal shell alises available when I shell out from Vim?

Two ideas:

Somehow EXPORT the aliases from the original shell, to its child process vim, and again to its shell child process
Configure Vim to read my .zshrc when creating its subshells

Best Answer

Old question, but the cleanest solution for vim in zsh was to add the alias to ~/.zshenv, the file that zsh loads for all shells, login, interactive, or otherwise. This avoids starting vim or zsh with flags and any possible problems with that.

There's a nice explanation of ~/.zshenv vs ~/.zshrc here: http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article25/shrc

Basically, zsh always sources ~/.zshenv. Interactive shells source ~/.zshrc, and login shells source ~/.zprofile and ~/.zlogin. Thus, an interactive login shell sources ~/.zshenv ~/.zprofile ~/.zlogin ~/.zlogin, and a noninteractive, nonlogin shell like the one vim uses to run commands only sources ~/.zshenv.

Related Solutions

Bash – How to use aliases in commands

You can set an environmental variable for that directory.

# Making the variable name consist entirely of capital letters makes the
# variable less likely to conflict with other variables in scripts. You can
# make the variable name consist of lowercase letters but you may run
# into problems. 
export DB=/some/very/long/path/db

Then you can use the exported variable in Vim as such:

:e $DB/file.java

and in your shell as such:

grep -r string $DB

The variable-substitution facilities of Vim and bash are entirely independent from each other. Vim just happens to substitute environmental variables in a manner similar to bash (and many other shells).

zsh – How to Stack Shell Aliases

A shell alias behaves pretty similarly to a #define, i.e. redefining a shell alias would override the previous one.

I'm not sure what would be the Right Way^TM, but one approach would be making use a shell function that accepts parameters and using that to create an alias. Your code snippet could be rewritten as:

if [ -f /usr/bin/pacmatic ]; then
    pacman() { pacmatic "$@"; }
fi

# Colorized Pacman output
alias pacman="pacman --color auto"

Moreover, even if you were using different aliases and were trying to use one for defining the other, it would not work as aliases are not expanded in non-interactive mode by default. You need to enable it by setting expand_aliases:

shopt -s expand_aliases

Quoting from the manual:

   Aliases are not expanded when the shell is not interactive, unless  the
   expand_aliases  shell option is set using shopt (see the description of
   shopt under SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – How to use aliases in commands

zsh – How to Stack Shell Aliases

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