Vim, tmux, and Fish

2023-01-18 @ 11:23

I do most of my text editing with MacVim, but when I pair with people I like to use tmate. tmate is just an easy way to connect tmux sessions with a remote person. But this means that I go from coding in a GUI to coding in a terminal. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but I had made a Fish alias that would open the MacVim GUI every time I typed vim in the terminal. Of course when I’m pairing via tmate, the other people cannot see the GUI, so I would have to remember a different command to open Vim.

Today I did about 10min of research to fix this problem and came up with the following Fish command:

$ cat .config/fish/functions/vim.fish 
function vim --wraps='vim' --description 'open Vim'
  if set -q TMUX # if we're in a TMUX session, open in terminal
    command vim $argv
  else
    # Otherwise open macvim
    open -a MacVim $argv; 
  end
end

All it does is open terminal Vim if I’m in a TMUX session, otherwise it opens the MacVim GUI.

Instead of putting up with this frustration for such a long time, I should have taken the 10 min required to fix the situation. This was a good reminder for me, and hopefully I’ll be better about it in the future!