[SOLVED] What is the correct/recommended way to run a shell command in NeoVim in the background?

Neovim
1

Hi,

As mentioned in the title, how do I run a shell command in NeoVim in the background/silently, without affecting my current buffer or opening up new buffers?

The reason I’m asking this is I’m currently set up Common Lisp dev environment and I need to run this in the background (to connect to SWANK server):

! xterm -e sbcl --load /usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime/start-swank.lisp &

but looks like it does nothing.

I tried to manually run this in NeoVim by :! xterm -e sbcl --load /usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime/start-swank.lisp & but nothing happened. No further output either.

I know that there are a few ways to run a command in the background and there’s even a plugin for that, but what is the recommended way, ideally without installing another plugin? Please help, thanks!

2

I’ve been looking into this briefly for my own future needs and it seems the job functions should be able to do this.

https://neovim.io/doc/user/job_control.html

1 Like
3

not a solution, but just a note
if ur already using some popular plugins, you might have plenary installed as a dependency, which has a handy Job interface in lua.

4

Thanks for the link! It was helpful. I changed the command and started using jobstart:

let g:slimv_swank_cmd = "call jobstart('xterm -e & sbcl --load ${pkgs.vimPlugins.slimv}/slime/start-swank.lisp')"

and it’s working correctly now. Thanks a lot!

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