---
date: "2006-09-16T03:38:15Z"
title: 'VIM-Shell: Why Hasn''t Vim Had This All Along?'
---

<p>I stumbled across <a href="http://www.wana.at/vimshell/" title="Best Vim extension ever.">VIM-Shell</a> completely on accident. it's a patch
against <a href="http://www.vim.org/">Vim</a> that does exactly what it sounds like; adds
rudimentary shell support to Vim.  Check it out:</p>

<table border='0'>
<tr><td>
<a href='http://pablotron.org/gallery/misc/vimshell.png'><img 
  src='http://pablotron.org/gallery/misc/vimshell-thumb.png'
  width='320' height='200' border='0' style='border: 1px solid black;'
  title='Vim with a bunch of shell apps.'
  alt='Vim with a bunch of shell apps.' /></a>
</td></tr><tr><td style='text-align: center; font-size: 80%; font-weight: bold;'>
VIM-Shell with a bunch of apps (1680x1050 <acronym title='Portable Network Graphics Image File'>PNG</acronym>).
</td></tr></table>

<p>The default patch kind of blows, so I cleaned it up and fixed a couple
bugs (namely, the <a href="http://www.wogri.at/pipermail/vimshell/2005-January/000089.html" title="Description of the VIM-Shell red terminal bug.">red terminal o' death</a> bug reported on the
<a href="http://www.wogri.at/pipermail/vimshell/" title="The VIM-Shell mailing list.">mailing list</a>).  I've submitted the my fixes upstream, but they
haven't been incorperated into the official version yet. In the mean
time, you can get my improved patch by following the link below.</p>

<p><a href="http://pablotron.org/files/vim-7.0.72-vimshell-pabs-1.diff.gz" title="My improved VIM-Shell patch against Vim 7.">Download vim-7.0.72-vimshell-pabs-1.diff.gz</a> (<a href="http://pablotron.org/files/vim-7.0.72-vimshell-pabs-1.diff.gz.asc" title="OpenPGP signature for my improved VIM-Shell patch against Vim 7.">Signature</a>)</p>

<p><em>Note:</em> If you compile it under Linux, you'll need to add a link to
<code>libutil</code>, either via <code>configure</code> or <code>make</code>, like so:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p><code>$ ./configure LDFLAGS=-lutil</code></p>
</blockquote>

<p>or</p>

<blockquote>
  <p><code>$ make LDFLAGS=-lutil</code></p>
</blockquote>

<p>If you don't, you'll get an undefined reference to <code>forkpty()</code>.  I
believe this is a problem with the original patch as well.  Now that
you're all excited, here's what VIM-Shell still needs:</p>

<ul>
<li>Slightly better color emulation.  Occasionally things seem to "bleed".</li>
<li>Session support.  I use sessions pretty regularly, and it'd be nice to
at least restore a blank shell.  Even better would be pwd and history.</li>
<li>A way to send a literal <code>Ctrl-W</code> to the shell.  Lots of apps use <code>^W</code>,
including Vim and Bash, so not having it is kind of annoying.  Maybe a 
<a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/">Screen</a>-style escape like <code>^Ww</code>?</li>
</ul>

<p>Even with all these relatively minor gotchas, VIM-Shell is still damn
cool.</p>