A plugin that leverages Neovim's native client-server feature to make opening files
from within Neovim's terminal emulator without experiencing weird behavior easier and completely automatic.
Terminal buffers will no longer enter a state of "inception" in which an instance of
Neovim is open within an instance of Neovim. Instead, the desired files and
directories will be opened by the "host" Neovim session, which leverages
:argedit to update its own arguments.
demo-compressed.mp4
The plugin tells Neovim to automatically start a local server listening to a named pipe at launch. Upon launching a new Neovim session within a terminal emulator buffer, the arguments are forwarded to the aforementioned Neovim server session via the pipe, and the server session replaces the buffer under the cursor, which should be the terminal buffer, with the first file/directory argument specified.
Requires Neovim 0.7 or higher and a bash or somewhat bash-like shell.
It is assumed that you have the ability to run the realpath and pgrep
commands in the shell that is used to launch Neovim, as well as the shell used
by the internal Neovim terminal emulator. The user launching Neovim must also
have the ability to write to /tmp/, and the $USER environment variable is assumed to be set.
I'm sure there are plenty. This plugin is experimental and probably has some
(several) unaccounted for edge cases. It works well enough for me but YMMV. Unception can be temporarily disabled
when launching Neovim if you run into any side-effects like so: nvim --cmd "let g:disable_unception=1".
If using Neovim as your default editor for git, for example, and you would like to be able to use it from within the terminal emulator, I would reccommend updating your .gitconfig to always pass the flag to disable unception described above.
If trying to open a NEW Neovim instance outside of the terminal emulator when an instance using this plugin is already running, the arguments will instead be piped to the existing Neovim server, and a new Neovim instance will not be launched. This means you can really only use one Neovim instance at a time (per user) unless disabling this plugin when launching the new Neovim session.
Other Neovim non-filepath command-line arguments that do not involve editing a file or directory may or may not work as expected from within the terminal emulator; try them out and let me know if there's an issue :). Note that any commands that might not work well within the Neovim terminal emulator should work just fine when launching the initial server session.
Additionally, if any of the commands passed to the Neovim server session through the terminal buffer conflict with arguments provided to the initial host session, they probably won't work.
When the server session receives the command, the old terminal buffer is deleted when the new file is switched to. It assumes that the terminal buffer used to send the command will be the one under the cursor at the time the server receives the command. This happens extremely quickly, so it should not be an issue unless you're the Flash, but it's worth noting.
If something goes horribly wrong, try deleting the pipe in the /tmp/ directory. It will be named nvim-<username>.pipe.
Using vim-plug:
Plug 'samjwill/nvim-unception'
Using packer.nvim:
use "samjwill/nvim-unception"