Improving mvim for MacVim

Paul Kehrer — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:24:25 +0000

MacVim comes with a clever script called mvim which allows you to open files in MacVim via the command line (much like mate for TextMate). This is a wonderful tool, but does possess some idiosyncrasies. It creates a new window (rather than a new tab) when you invoke it and it also won’t take stdin as input unless you pass a dash¹.

To fix this I modified the script to check for an existing macvim process, and if it exists attach tabs to it.² Additionally, it checks for args and if none are present (or just -) the script invokes stdin. I am not much of a bash hacker though, so there are a few caveats…

–remote-tab-silent doesn’t seem to work with listening on stdin, so the script always pops it out into a new window.
You (apparently) can’t pass extra parameters when using –remote-tab-silent, so tricks like mvim /etc/hosts +5 to have it open with the cursor on line 5 will not work.

These are both irritating, but I feel the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Hopefully someone can contribute fixes to these problems!

#!/bin/sh
#
# This shell script passes all its arguments to the binary inside the
# MacVim.app application bundle.  If you make links to this script as view,
# gvim, etc., then it will peek at the name used to call it and set options
# appropriately.
#
# Based on a script by Wout Mertens and suggestions from Laurent Bihanic.  This
# version is the fault of Benji Fisher, 16 May 2005 (with modifications by Nico
# Weber and Bjorn Winckler, Aug 13 2007.  Some mediocre hacking by Paul Kehrer Sep 30 2009).
# First, check "All the Usual Suspects" for the location of the Vim.app bundle.
# You can short-circuit this by setting the VIM_APP_DIR environment variable
# or by un-commenting and editing the following line:
# VIM_APP_DIR=/Applications
 
if [ -z "$VIM_APP_DIR" ]
then
	myDir="`dirname "$0"`"
	myAppDir="$myDir/../Applications"
	for i in ~/Applications ~/Applications/vim $myDir $myDir/vim $myAppDir $myAppDir/vim /Applications /Applications/vim /Applications/Utilities /Applications/Utilities/vim; do
		if [ -x "$i/MacVim.app" ]; then
			VIM_APP_DIR="$i"
			break
		fi
	done
fi
if [ -z "$VIM_APP_DIR" ]
then
	echo "Sorry, cannot find MacVim.app.  Try setting the VIM_APP_DIR environment variable to the directory containing MacVim.app."
	exit 1
fi
binary="$VIM_APP_DIR/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim"
 
# Next, peek at the name used to invoke this script, and set options
# accordingly.
 
name="`basename "$0"`"
gui=
opts=
 
# GUI mode, implies forking
case "$name" in m*|g*|rg*) gui=true ;; esac
 
# Restricted mode
case "$name" in r*) opts="$opts -Z";; esac
 
# vimdiff and view
case "$name" in
	*vimdiff)
		opts="$opts -dO"
		;;
	*view)
		opts="$opts -R"
		;;
esac
 
tabs=true
stdinoption=false
 
#let's see if we need to read from stdin
#script currently assumes NO PARAMETERS
if [ -z "$1" ] || [[ $1 == \- ]]; then
	stdinoption=true
fi
 
# Last step:  fire up vim.
# The program should fork by default when started in GUI mode, but it does
# not; we work around this when this script is invoked as "gvim" or "rgview"
# etc., but not when it is invoked as "vim -g".
if [ "$gui" ]; then
	# Note: this isn't perfect, because any error output goes to the
	# terminal instead of the console log.
	# But if you use open instead, you will need to fully qualify the
	# path names for any filenames you specify, which is hard.
	if $stdinoption; then
		exec "$binary" -g - 
	else 
		if $tabs && [ `ps x|grep 'MacOS/MacVim'|grep -v grep|wc -l` = "1" ] && [[ `$binary --serverlist` = "VIM" ]]; then
			#when using remote tabs you can't pass things like +5.
			exec "$binary" -g $opts --remote-tab-silent ${1:+"$@"}
		else
			exec "$binary" -g $opts ${1:+"$@"} 
		fi
	fi
else
	exec "$binary" $opts ${1:+"$@"}
fi

This is the standard vim way, but feels irritatingly inelegant to me. ↩
The script does a ps x to check for the existence of a macvim process. This is done before the serverlist check because the script will output ugly errors to stdout if there is no macvim process. ↩

langui.sh » macvim bash

Improving mvim for MacVim