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Tip 957 Previous Tip • Next Tip

Created: July 7, 2005 Complexity: basic Author: Jonathan Orlev Minimum version: 5.7 Karma: 4/11 Imported from: Tip#957

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For me, the most irritating thing when using the wonderful Vim is starting a second copy of Vim while a first one was already running.

For example: opening a file already open in the first Vim instance within a second instance of Vim gives an error message, because the swap file is already in use (not to mention that this might cause a loss of data).

So I added this to my vimrc. I am using gvim on Windows, but this will probably also work with gvim in other systems.

" If the v:servername ends with a number, then this is for sure a second
" copy of Vim.
if v:servername =~? '^.*[0-9][0-9]*$'
  echo "MyWarning: Another copy of gvim or Vim is probably loaded!"
endif

[edit] Comments

For users running gvim on Unixes, an alternative is to always use

/usr/local/bin/gvim --remote-silent FILENAME

If gvim is already running, the file is opened there. Otherwise, a new gvim instance is started.

For interactive shell sessions, it would help to define a shorter alias, such as:

alias gvimrem='/usr/local/bin/gvim --remote-silent'

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Here is a better version for the tip. This is more general, and therefore preferable:

" If the serverlist contains more than one item, than another instance of
" Vim is loaded.
if serverlist() =~? "\n."
  echo "MyWarning: Another copy of gvim or Vim is probably loaded !"
endif

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And you may also replace the operator '=~?' with '=~'

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See the :RemoteOpen command from remoteopen.vim which is part of latex-suite plugin.

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