I’m trying to achieve a setup where certain “supplemental” buffers are kept in a separate OS window from my primary editor content. This separate window could be placed on a secondary display. The sorts of supplemental buffers I’m talking about are:
- Quickfix list and friends
- Debug console/UI (see nvim-dap-ui)
- Vim help
- Filesystem explorer
- Etc
You get the idea-- this sort of stuff is often jarring to bring up in the main OS window, because it reshapes the existing editor windows (i.e. panes). You can somewhat alleviate the problem by using floating windows, but this isn’t ideal either, since it obscures on-screen content and makes it difficult to cross-reference supplemental material with that content. A much better UX could be achieved by keeping a separate window for the supplemental material.
However, I’m not aware of any way to do this-- I use VimR and multiple windows seem to contain totally different nvim
instances. Is there any way to use multiple OS windows for a single underlying nvim instance? If not, is a suitable API on the roadmap?