Question

I want to capture the output of a Vim command (:sign place), scripting in Python with the vim module.

I can execute commands with vim.command(...), but this doesn’t return the output of the command. I can evaluate vimL commands with vim.eval(...), but this only works for variables and functions, not commands.

The only way I could capture the output of this command was to redirect to a register and then evaluate the contents of the register:

vim.command('redir @a')
vim.command('silent sign place')
vim.command('redir END')
command_output = vim.eval('@a')

But this seems like a lot of work for an apparently simple task. Is there a better way of doing this?

Note: this is not a question specific to the example command, sign place – it’s valid for any command.

Answer 1

There’s currently no better way of capturing the output of a Vim command from a Python script, apart from redirecting (to a variable or buffer) and then evaluating the contents of that.