Fish Virtuoso

This plugin optimizes how fish interacts with nvim in a way that is backwards-compatible with vim and vi. It provides extra integration when the Neovim Remote is available, in a way that plays well both with the built-in nvim terminal and with tmux.

Note: this plugin is no longer actively maintained. For my use, I found that the integration of tmux and nvr — while neat — often just gets in the way. For simply choosing the best alternative among several Vim binaries (vi, vim, nvim), fish-abbrfile is more general and can do the job just fine. If you still prefer virtuoso, and would be interested in maintaining it, feel free to contact me.

Motivation

If you want the following functionality, then this plugin is for you:

• Automatically select the best available $EDITOR when fish starts. I realize that "best" is subjective, but in my opinion the order should be nvr, nvim, vim, vi. The options to the left are used if available, but more hosts have the ones to the right. Due to the how the integration is done, nvr is only chosen as $EDITOR if you start fish inside nvim or tmux.
• Provide the same editing commands in the shell as in vim command mode. In other words, the commands edit, split, vsplit, and tabedit (and their abbreviations e, sp, vs, tabe) should do the same thing in fish and vim. If your $EDITOR is nvr, these actions are performed in an existing nvim instance.
• Integrate the excellent Neovim Remote in a smart way. If you use nvr within the built-in terminal of nvim, this means that the surrounding nvim is used. If you run nvr inside tmux, the assumption is that you only want one nvim instance per tmux window, so the currently visible nvim instance in your tmux window is reused. Since $EDITOR is automatically set to nvr when applicable, commands like git and nnn also reuse these existing editor windows.
• To help you start typing e or edit instead of nvr/nvim/vim/vi, since the latter are less portable, I added some abbreviations that help. If you dislike this, let me know, and I can add an option to disable them.

Screencast

This is what you can expect when you use nvr + tmux:

A similar experience can be expected with the built-in terminal :term in nvim. When nvr or nvim is not available, the plugin falls back to vim or vi. The screencast uses these dotfiles with tmux-tilish and vim-tmux-navigator.

Quickstart

The easiest way to install this is using fisher:

fisher add jabirali/fish-virtuoso

Restart fish, and everything should work by itself. If it doesn't, feel free to open an issue on Github!

The plugin works particularly well with the Neovim Remote, both for people who use nvim inside tmux, and for people who use the built-in nvim terminal. The easiest way to install this software is to use the Python package manager pip:

pip3 install neovim-remote

Remember to check that your pip install path (e.g. ~/.local/bin) is in $PATH.

Known issues

If you use nvr inside tmux, and nvim is killed in an improper way, you may run into issues once you try to restart nvr in the same tmux window. This is because the files ~/.cache/nvim/nvr* used by the nvim session will not have been cleaned up properly. If this happens, just remove the relevant file, e.g. ~/.cache/nvim/nvr$1@2 for tmux session 1 window 2. If you're unsure what file to remove, just run echo $NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS.

Acknowledgements

The nvr integration is strongly inspired by this thread on Reddit.

Related projects

• fish-prefer