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How to run a terminal inside of vim?
I can setup my workspace nicely with split and vsplit and open… but I would like to simply use one of the splits as a terminal window. I know opening an additional xterm and placing it strategically might be able to accomplish this but many times I am telneted into a single window and my hands are beginning to hurt from alt tabbing between terminals.
Update: The best thing I came up with based on the suggestions below was to use screen and actually have vim occupy one of its windows.
Consider running Vim and a shell together in GNU Screen. The Vim wiki has info on integrating Vim and Screen. Screen supports splitting into ‘windows’ similar to Vim’s. See here for an example of even tighter Vim+Screen integration.
Having a Vim buffer tied directly to an external interactive commandline app is a feature that many have wanted for a long time, but apparently it’s a bit difficult to do, due to how Vim is implemented, and the Vim devs are reluctant to change this (for arguably good reasons).
But there have been a few success stories. The Lisp community in particular has tried to reproduce Emacs’ SLIME (an interactive Lisp prompt) in Vim. See VimClojure and Limp for examples. One of those could probably be altered to run a shell, but it’d take some work.