Question

I want gvim to always open in a separate window and return the command prompt immediately. In other words I want

gvim filename

to be the same as

gvim filename &

it seems like I should be able to do this with an alias. Is there a special wildcard character for aliases? Something like:

alias gvim="gvim <wildcard> &"

Where “wildcard” would be replaced by whatever text comes after gvim on the command line.

I also tried:

function gvim() 
{ 
    "/cygdrive/c/program files (x86)/vim/vim72/gvim.exe" "$@" "&" ;
}

But it only opens gvim and doesn’t return the prompt like I want it to.

If someone could point me in the right direction, it would greatly improve my understanding of how .bashrc works.

Thanks!

-Derek

UPDATE: I got it to work by getting rid of the quotation marks around the & and the semicolon at the end:

function gvim() 
{ 
    "/cygdrive/c/program files (x86)/vim/vim72/gvim.exe" "$@" &
}

Answer 1

The last is almost right. What is wrong is that plain & tells shell to run process in the background and "&" adds argument to the gvim command-line (i.e. instructs gvim to open file named &). By using quotes here you just instruct shell not to treat & specially and gvim has no reason to do the shell’s job.