Hi friends,I have a (yet another) workflow problemManaging the terminal and Neovim efficiently can be confusing. Is Neovim a terminal app, or is the terminal a Neovim process? There are too many options: multiplexing, terminal commands, and various plugins.
How Most People Solve ItMost developers tend to fire up another GUI window for their terminal. The more “advanced” use a terminal tab, completely unaware of Neovim’s internal emulator they can start with Why It Doesn’t Work for ThemThose familiar with the internal emulator often get frustrated after the first use! To step out of the internal emulator to an external pane, you'd have to use the non-straightforward Instead of fighting the default mappings, I added a few to improve my internal emulator flow: Remap
This, however, is only one step in the right direction, let's imrprove it further to seamlessly integrate the internal emulator as if it was just another Neovim split: Add Using the internal emulator is nice, but it still felt like mixing my coding environment with something it shouldn't have. Floating TerminalsI love floating panes. If you’re a floating pane person, try implementing FlowTerm for floating terminals within Neovim. This allows persistent, toggle-able terminals that overlay your code, ideal for quick tasks. My only issues with FlowTerm are:
Multiplexers for Persistent SessionsMy previous go-to was Tmux for managing long-lived sessions separately from Neovim (any other multiplexing options is valid here). This ensures your terminal sessions remain active, even when you close Neovim. However, this comes with a “price”; using a window split, forces me to go through these steps to access my terminal:
This, to the “least keystrokes” trained Neovim junkie, is unacceptable. The other obvious option is to use a separate multiplexer window. In Tmux, this makes things quicker—one key binding to jump back and forth to an already fullscreen Neovim/terminal session. But there’s another price to be paid:
The Solution: A Floating Tmux PaneZellij has floating panes. While I love Zellij, I’m still very much a Tmux user, so why not have the same in Tmux? While you can get a Tmux popup, it lacks in many ways:
Introducing Tmux-Floax!A floating Tmux pane with persistence, configurable style, and more. I’ll dive into Floax in a future issue, but for now, here’s how it solves everything I wanted and more:
Out of all the options above, Tmux-Floax seems to be my optimal solution, removing friction, adding joy, and making my workflow 5% better 😎. I’d really appreciate it if you give Floax a quick ⭐ on GitHub! Thank you for reading! As always, feel free to reply to this email with thoughts and comments :) |
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