README.md

vis-tmux-repl

This plugin can be used to send selected snippets of code to a specified pane inside tmux, where presumably an interpreter (Read-Eval-Print Loop) is running.

A demo can be seen here.

Usage

To use the plugin, include:

require('tmux-repl')

in your visrc.lua.

Setting the target pane

First, you need to specify the target pane for the current window, to which the selected snippets will be sent. You can do it by either of the two commands:

• repl-set [PANE_ID] -- set an existing pane identified by PANE_ID as the target pane; if no PANE_ID is provided, the marked pane is used,
• repl-new [CMD] -- open a new pane in vertical split and set it to the target pane; optionally, the command CMD will be run inside the new pane.

For example you can use commands like :repl-new python or :repl-new R to open the interpreter for the respective language.

Sending text to the target pane

• repl-send -- sends the current selection to the target pane,
• repl-sendln [TEXT] -- sends TEXT to the target pane.

The latter is useful e.g. for calling :repl-sendln make to a shell to recompile your project - you can set a keybinding for that.

Recommended keybindings

Setting some keybindings in visrc.lua will allow you to use the interpreters efficiently:

vis.events.subscribe(vis.events.INIT, function()
    -- ... (other initial settings)

    vis:command("map! normal <C-r> :repl-new")
    vis:command("map! normal <C-e> :repl-set<Enter>")
    vis:command("map! visual <C-e> :repl-send<Enter><vis-mode-normal>")
end)

Possible bugs

The script relies on tmux's send-keys command called from the shell. Although it tries to correctly escape all whitespace and special characters and has been tested with several languages (Python, R, Haskell), there might still be bugs related to that.

See also

The implementation of a similar solution for Vim was described step by step here: Executing code chunks from Vim