Monday, April 20, 2015

Hacking my Habits: screen vim → gvim

I spend much of my time using the screen command inside a VM, opening vim in a new window by running screen vim.  When I'm on bare metal, then, sometimes I accidentally start a whole screen for a quick edit, and I don't realize it until I exit vim and it says, [screen is terminating].

So I built a little function into my ~/.bash_aliases (sourced from the default .bashrc) on the host machine:
# if I run `screen vim` outside of screen, invoke gvim instead.
screen() {
 if [[ $1 = vim && -z $STY ]] ; then
  shift
  gvim ${1+"$@"}
 else
  command screen ${1+"$@"}
 fi
}

Now "screen <anything but vim>" will run screen, and "screen vim" will invoke gvim.  The latter may surprise me, but it'll be what I actually want.

Update: I put similar code inside the VM to convert "gvim" into "screen vim" or regular "vim", as appropriate. Now I abuse this all the time to save three keystrokes ("gvim" vs "scr<TAB>vim").

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