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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T21:32:05+00:00

I’m trying to log the time I spend working in vim. I’ve got a

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I’m trying to log the time I spend working in vim. I’ve got a script that works with gvim but when I try to set it up with vim it locks up the terminal session silently or with the message ‘Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal’

Here is the script that works with gvim: 

#!/bin/sh                                                                                                                                                                                                        

workfile="/home/na/writing/fiction.txt"                                                                                                                                                                          
worklog="/home/na/writing/worktime.log"                                                                                                                                                                          

d=`date --rfc-3339 date`                                                                                                                                                                                         
t=$( { /usr/bin/time -f "%e" /usr/local/bin/gvim -f -S /home/na/.vim/writeroom/writeroom.vim $workfile; } 2>&1 )                                                                                                 
w=`wc -w $workfile`                                                                                                                                                                                              

echo $d $t $w >> $worklog

When I close the gvim window I get a logfile containing a date, the number of seconds I spent editing the file, and a word count for the file. 

2011-08-15 700.15 238869 /home/na/writing/fiction.txt

I would like the same using vim in a terminal session.

I understand vim talks to the terminal directly instead of to stdout but I don’t care about what vim returns, I want the output from the time command.

These don’t work: 

t=`/usr/bin/time -f "%e" /usr/local/bin/vim -f $workfile`                                                                                                                                                            
t=$( { /usr/bin/time -f "%e" /usr/local/bin/vim -f $workfile; } 2>&1 )                                                                                                                                               
t=$( { /usr/bin/time -f "%e" /usr/local/bin/vim -f $workfile; } )

I suspect there’s some combination of backticks and paranthesis that will make this work but I haven’t stumbled onto it yet.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The backtick or $() operators capture vim’s output (what you see on the terminal when opening vim is vim’s output from its stdout), so you can’t do that.

    You could try this instead:

    start=$(date +%s)
/usr/local/bin/vim -f $workfile
end=$(date +%s)
duration=$((end-start))
echo "$duration"
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