Can you make vi “advance” the screen when opened?

Question

I often work in vi, suspend vi, run something on the cli, and then fg back into vi to work on the results. For instance, fixing errors that showed up when I ran the cli command.

However, when I fg vi, vi "wipes" the current terminal buffer and I can't see the "last screenful" of terminal output in the scrollback buffer.

Is there some setting in vi (or screen, I use screen) which would help me here?

I have searched google for a long time with no answers. I also realize that there are other workflows that solve this problem, but they aren't perfect (run from inside vi means no shell completion, etc).

Answer 1

I don't know if this will help but: I use a mac these days, but I used to use NetBSD and Linux at uni. It always bugged me that programs like less, man, vi, etc. would clear the screen when they exited. I could switch it off in less with the -X option, but that wasn't an option (literally) with the others.

I found a config setting in xterm that solved the problem for me. I'm afraid I don't remember the option; it was available through one of the menus and I think through the -xrw commandline option.

Obviously this can only be helpful if you use xterm.

Answer 2

Changing your terminal type to ansi could work:

:set term=ansi

But I'm sure there are some negative side effects.

Answer 3

In answer to your question in your comment on this answer: it seems to actually be the t_ti variable. In your ~/.vimrc add a line that says:

set t_ti=""

You can try it out first from within vim by entering that command at the : prompt.

Answer 4

This is not a solution, but a nice workaround, that I've just started using. Create the following wrapper script for vi (I placed it in my ~/bin/vim-wrapper) and possibly alias it with something like:

alias vi='~/bin/vim-wrapper'

Content of vim-wrapper (see this answer for details):

#!/bin/bash
LINES=$(tput lines)
for i in `seq 1 $LINES`; do
    echo $i
done
vim $@

This will solve completely the screen wiped out issue. Unfortunately, it does not solve the have to scroll up quite a lot when you edit a long file in vim. But if you set a large enough buffer in your xterm-like (I use gnome terminal 2.22.1) you'd be ok.

Answer 5

If you're using screen, then surely it would make sense to do your editing in one window, and your compiles in the other, and then just use the ^A[n] sequences to flip between your terminal output and code screens?

Answer 6

I'm not 100% sure whether this will help you or not, but vim tries to restore the screen it found when it was started. I like that behavior and spent quite a bit of time to "repair" a vim installation on a machine where this didn't work.

I had to set the t_ti and t_te variables. My hunch is that you should unset t_te.