Using neovim within flatten.nvim to edit long commands?

[IMO]

Context

Using neovim to edit a command in the normal shell

You can set neovim as the VISUAL environment variable so that pressing <C-x><C-e> opens it in neovim for editting:

It's a "bash" thing that's common in other shells as well. In the bash man-page, it's explained like this:

Invoke an editor on the current command line, and execute the result as shell commands. Bash attempts to invoke $VISUAL, $EDITOR, and emacs as the editor, in that order.

It looks something like this:

Using neovim to edit a command in the embedded neovim terminal shell

If you use neovim-remote you can detect when your shell is running within neovim and set VISUAL to be nvr -cc tabedit --remote-wait +'set bufhidden=wipe'. That way, instead of launching a nested neovim instance it will use the existing neovim instance to edit the command in a separate tab, inserting it on "save"

I got this from "Modern Vim" Tip 22 Using an Existing nvim Instance as the Preferred Editor, although it's a common practice

Question

If you try this with the default config and VISUAL=nvim, saving the edited command exits neovim completely:

So I was wondering whether it would be possible to have the same neovim-remote behavior with flatten.nvim i.e. opening the long command in a separate buffer for editing and recover it on save (:wq)

Perhaps one approach would be to mess with the VISUAL env var as well, or remapping the <C-x><C-e> keypress?

[Will Hopkins]

Alright, I think I have a better idea of this now, I'll start looking into a solution.

[IMO]

Ah indeed, I fixed the links and added a link to the chapter of the book I referenced.

I also found another plugin whose sole purpose is to handle this situation: nvim-editcommand

I'll use that for now, but I still think it could be a nice feature for your plugin as well 😬

[Will Hopkins]

@imochoa The edit-exec branch should work, would you mind trying it out before I merge? It works for me but I'm on ZSH.
Make sure to set VISUAL="nvim --cmd 'let g:flatten_wait=1'". Thanks!

(the global only exists if it's set from the commandline, the only check is that it's not nil)

[IMO]

Sorry for the delay, I was moving this weekend 😅
I just tested it and it works, thanks! That's really cool, now there's no need to mess around with neovim-remote as far as I'm concerned :)

By the way, I tested with both:

• VISUAL="nvim"
• VISUAL="nvim --cmd 'let g:flatten_wait=1'"
  and I did not notice a difference in behavior between them

[Will Hopkins]

No worries! Not sure why that would be, it's required for me unless the filetype is set to block in the config, but if it works it works :)