Vim-tmux-send

A plugin that lets you send text or commands from Vim/Neovim to the next tmux pane. A minimal plugin inspired by vim-slime. Some use cases are

• Running/compiling the current vim buffer in the next tmux pane.
• Sending some text from your vim buffer to a REPL, e.g. an interactive python shell to quickly test part of your code.

Installation

Use your preferred installation method for Vim plugins. With vim-plug you would put something like the following in your vimrc:

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
    Plug 'slarwise/vim-tmux-send'
call plug#end()

Usage

The following commands and functions are available:

• Function SendSelection. Takes a motion and sends the text covered by the motion to the next tmux pane and executes it.
• Command SendMakeCmd. Executes makeprg for the current buffer in the next tmux pane.
• Command SendLine. Sends and executes the current line in the next tmux pane.
• Command SendKeys. Takes a string as argument and sends that string to the next tmux pane. Useful for making your own commands.

The SendKeys command is used by all the other sommands to do the actual sending of text so have a look at the code if you want to write your own commands. For example, to execute ls in the next pane you could write :SendKeys "ls ENTER". Tmux has some special keywords, ENTER being one of them which emulates pressing the enter key.

Mappings and examples

vim-tmux-send does not come with any mappings but here is an example.

• nnoremap <LEADER>sm :SendMakeCmd<CR>
• nnoremap <LEADER>ss :SendLine<CR>
• nnoremap <LEADER>s :set operatorfunc=SendSelection<CR>g@

The last mapping takes a motion and sends the corresponding text. See :h g@ and :h operatorfunc for more information on how this works. With the above mapping, pressing <LEADER>sj sends the current line and the line below, <LEADER>sap sends the current paragraph and <LEADER>siw sends the current word. Just use your regular vim motions.

Improvements

Right now the tmux pane that the text is sent to is hard coded to be the next pane, and if there is only one pane open an error message is given. A variable for setting which pane to send to could be good. Visually selecting text and sending is not supported at the moment, that shouldn't be too hard to implement.