Advanced Vim Sessions
I have blogged before about vim sessions and how useful they are. This post is about a pattern I discovered (though I’m likely not the first to discover it) at work when frustrated that certain settings were not stored in the session.
Note (2017-05-24) : this post has a critical error, see the updated version instead.
So here was how my original frustration surfaced; I was using
Obsession, as I’ve mentioned before,
which automatically updates your session file periodically and saves open files,
window layouts, etc. One of the things I discovered that it does not save is
the path.
If you recall, I discussed the incredible value of path in a post about the
gf feature. Because of gf I tend to need path to
be correctly set all the time.
For a long time I was sure that the path was getting correctly saved by
Obsession and that I was just somehow clearing it (recall that I was having
system stability issues in general) but at some
point I was chatting with some coworkers and decided to track it down for sure.
One option is to modify the sessionoptions
setting.
I think simply doing set sessionoptions+=options would work for this case, but
then you may end up persisting a lot more than you want. I just wanted this
one setting.
🔗 Nested Sessions
The idea I came up with was to nest sessions. I created an outer session, and it looks like this:
set path+=app/lib
source /home/frew/.vvar/sessions/_zr
So all it does is set the path and then basically loads the inner session,
which enables all of the normal Obsession convenience.
That’s super convenient and goes a long way, but yesterday I thought of another
really useful pattern. You can load plugins or a set of plugins from a session;
so while I almost never need a plugin to syntax highlight
jinja, I want one when I am modifying salt
settings. So here’s what I do:
Get some plugins:
mkdir ~/code/vim-salt-plugins
cd ~/code/vim-salt-plugins
git clone git://github.com/saltstack/salt-vim
git clone git://github.com/lepture/vim-jinja
Load them in the outer session:
call pathogen#infect('/home/frew/code/vim-salt-plugins/{}')
source /home/frew/.vvar/sessions/_salt
I’m not sure how well the above works with, say, Vundle, but I imagine it
could be done. With this I now have plugins for specific, weird projects that I
don’t end up carrying around with my dotfiles all the time. I love it.
I’m really pleased with this pattern. I expect to use it for more things in the future. One idea that springs to mind is plugins that are only appropriate for one project; just commit the vim script directly and source it from the outer session. But for now this is already incredibly convenient for me; I hope it is for you too!
(The following includes affiliate links.)
If you’d like to learn more, I can recommend two excellent books. I first
learned how to use vi from
Learning the vi and Vim Editors
Second, if you really want to up your editing game, check out
Practical Vim
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