Terminator and Vim love

For my day-to-day coding (when I don’t code in Java ;) ) I use vim editor and I like it a lot. It is arguably the tool of trade that needs quite amount of time to learn properly but it is surely rewarding. It has some amazing plugins and it is the editor that is installed on your linux servers so knowing at least some basics is almost necessary if you need to do some server administration.

For shell stuff I use zsh and great set of configurations/addition Oh-my-zsh. If you haven’t try it yet, you don’t know what are you missing.

Terminator is my terminal emulator of choice. It has some great features like:

• Vertical and horizontal split (Ctrl+Shift+E, Ctrl+Shift+O)
• Moving among splits (Alt+arrow)
• Resizing splits (Ctrl+Shift+arrow)
• Zooming split (Ctrl+X)
• Increase/decrease font size (Ctrl-+, Ctrl–, Ctrl-0)

I usually open vim inside terminator which gives nice and easy spliting, moving splits, running shell commands. Enviroment very much like those provided with tiling window manager. This setup cuts mouse usage to zero during coding sessions which is nice especially when working on laptop (and this is most of the time).

Here is how it looks like.

To make this setup even more easy to use I did simple integration with Dolphin file manager (KDE) to:

1. open directory with the terminator
2. open textual files with vim inside terminator.

To do first make a shell script terminator-open-dir with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
terminator --working-directory="$@"

Right click on a directory in Dolphin and go to Properties, choose File Type Options and in the list of application in the lower part of dialog choose Add and navigate to terminal-open-dir script. Make sure that script has executable flag set.

After this you will be able to Open with... directory with terminator.

To open textual file with vim inside terminator make a shell script terminator-vim with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
terminator --working-directory="`dirname "$@"`" -x vim "$@"

Repeat the above procedure but this time by right clicking on the file you would like to open with vim.

Here is another nice trick found here. If you put this in your .vimrc

map <silent> <F11> :call system("wmctrl -ir " . v:windowid . " -b toggle,fullscreen")<CR>

Pressing F11 will maximize terminator window and remove all window decorations giving you a nice distraction-free environment for work (you must install wmctrl for this to work).