I was searching today for a tool able to launch a shell in a vim. I found vim-shell.

It took me only a few minutes to have a patch against vim 6.4 working, and some more seconds to have the debs. sadly, it didn't fit my expectations. I hoped that vim-shell would allow me to switch between interactive shell and editing sessions, allowing to scroll in the history buffer, copy things, edit others, remove some lines, well, having the shell living in a vim window.

sadly :

  • vim-shell is only a terminal emulator in vim
  • it does not works well in gvim where the feature is the most needed (in a term, you can ^Z vim to have a shell, or run vim inside a screen and have as many shells as you like).

I hope such evolutions will come fast ...