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JaySandhu / neovim-mac

A fast Neovim GUI for macOS.
MIT License
171 stars 6 forks source link

Command line invocation #10

Open sfsam opened 2 years ago

sfsam commented 2 years ago

MacVim provides a bundled mvim script to launch the app from the command line. There are also symlinked variants for mview, mvimdiff, etc. That script seems to work by invoking the bundled Vim binary with the -g flag plus whatever other flags as appropriate. Since neovim works differently (no -g), I don't think that approach would work. I wonder if you have thought about this?

sfsam commented 1 year ago

FWIW, I looked into this a bit. After chasing some dead ends (shell scripting, Applescript), I found a StackOverflow answer that described a solution using Apple Events:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/62134037/111418

The answer was written by the guy who made BBEdit, a popular Mac code editor. Based on his answer, I put together a small tool, nvmm, for invoking Neovim.app with file arguments. The tool gets bundled with the app and can be symlinked to somewhere in your path:

ln -s /Applications/Neovim.app/Contents/Helpers/nvmm /usr/local/bin

Usage: nvmm [file ...]

Currently, it ignores flags, but that can be added if desired. For me, this is sufficient for now.

I don't want to clutter up your project more than I already have so I put it in my own fork so you can see if it is of any interest to you:

https://github.com/sfsam/neovim-mac/commit/aee467ba4bb841828387151fbb2be44aff89361e

JaySandhu commented 1 year ago

Super interesting solution. This is definitely something that we should support. Thanks for doing all the legwork.

I had some rough plans in my head for implementing this. I was thinking we could define a URL scheme for the app. One that would allow you to open files, tabs, or a new window with any arbitrary command line options passed to the neovim subprocess.

Haven't had much time to work on this project lately, but when I do this is a top priority.

sfsam commented 1 year ago

You might take a look at MacVim as they have also implemented a URL scheme (mvim://) in addition to their shell scripts. AFAIK, it only opens files and optionally positions the cursor.

I have implemented a subset of command-line options now. Perhaps some of this work will be useful for a URL scheme as well. I went this way because it seemed easiest for what I wanted to do.

https://github.com/sfsam/neovim-mac/commit/088fd8d78e483974c9f04b093c13b68c50ec13f8