Conque: Terminal emulators in Vim buffers

Sunday, June 3rd, 2012

For the longest time, I’ve searched for a way to run terminal emulators in Vim buffers.

As a kind of work-around, I created Bexec, which allows you to run the current contents of a buffer through an external program. It then captures the output and inserts/appends it to another buffer.

Although Bexec works reasonable, and still has it’s uses, it’s not a true terminal emulator in Vim. Today I finally found a Vim plugin that let’s you actually run interactive commands / terminals in Vim buffers: Conque.

It requires Vim with Python support built in. Installation is straight-forward if you’ve got the requirements.

Download the .vmb file, edit it in vim, and issue:

:so %

It will then be installed. Quit vim, restart it, and you can now run start using it:

:ConqueTerm bash

Very awesome.