Vim 8.1 released: support for running a terminal in a Vim window
Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor ‘Vi’, with a more complete feature set. It’s useful whether you’re already using vi or using a different editor.
Vim 8.1 has been released. This is a minor version that includes some new features, bug fixes, and documentation updates since Vim 8.0. The most notable of these is the support for running the terminal in the Vim window.
This feature is based on the new asynchronous features of Vim 8.0. Terminal windows can have many uses, like:
- Run a command, such as “make”, while continuing to edit in other windows. The progress of the command can be observed, the terminal window is continuously updated.
- Run a shell where you can execute a series of commands.
- Use the new terminal debugger plugin for debugging inside Vim. This is especially useful over an ssh connection, when opening other terminals is not possible or impractical. I use this to fix problems in Vim when travelling.
Running make in a terminal window while edit text:
The detected errors can be caught and added to a quickfix list, so you can jump straight to the cause of the problem.
Running a shell in a terminal window:
You can switch between the shell and the text window with CTRL-W w.
Using the terminal debugger plugin:
