You can find lot of posts on the internet which try to tell you how to improve the ways in which Vim is used. Well, here is another one.

#Vim Server, ZSH and Tiles

A Vim instance behaves as a server in which files can be opened through remote applications. Read :help client-server of Vim to know more about this. I generally keep multiple Vim sessions running, described by task they are related to.

A typical workspace has one instance of Vim running and multiple terminals around it. Lets call this workspace for project foo. So the name of Vim instance server will be foo:

vim --servername foo

And any file will be open in this server, using this command:

vim --servername foo --remote-silent bar.hs


+-----------------------+
|           |~$         |
|           |           |
|           |-----------+
|    Vim    |~$         |
|   Server  |           |
|           |-----------+
|           |~$         |
|           |           |
+-----------------------+

How this helps:

• Lets me keep a well defined separation on various projects I am working on. The list of files in the buffer per instance remains short and manageable.

• Also each instance can have its own project specific environment - current directory, python virtual environments etc.

For easing all this up, I use a set of helper functions in my zshrc:

# Set the name of vim session the terminal is tied up to
eset(){
    export VI_SERVER=$1
}

# Fire up a new server according to the argument supplied
vs(){
    eset $1
    vim --servername $VI_SERVER
}

# Open up the files in the environment Vim server.
es(){
    vim --servername $VI_SERVER --remote-silent $*
}

# Reuse Vim ZSH completions for vim completions
compdef _vim es

#Vim Sessions

Having multiple instances is great, but I don’t want to set each up every time I need resume working. For this I use Vim Sessions, which allow the current Vim state to be stored over the disk.

vim-session plugin will help you manage sessions easily. It is well integrated with Vim client-server.

From docs:

When you start Vim with a custom server name that matches one of the existing session names then the matching session will be automatically restored.