Modern Vim

Tip 19

Sending Commands to a Terminal Buffer

With Terminal mode, you can interact directly with a process running inside a terminal buffer. It’s also possible to interact with such a process by remote control, by calling the jobsend() function. The beauty of this is that you can use Vim script to automate certain interactions with a program. In this tip, you’ll create a simple :Restart command that you can use to restart a web server.

Preparation

The source code that accompanies this book includes a webapp directory. Switch to that directory and install the dependencies using npm:

$ cd code/webapp
$ npm install

Now open a terminal ...