Vim - Displaying Code Output in a New Window á la Textmate?

Question

A few months back I switched from Textmate to Vim. Overall I really love Vim, but one of the things I miss from Textmate is using the ⌘R command to run Ruby code and having the results neatly pop up in a new, scrollable window. Obviously, Vim is capable of running Ruby code and displaying the output with :w !ruby. The only downside to this is that if the resulting output is too long I can't scroll through it.

To combat this problem I tried modifying a :redir function from Vim Tips. It looks like this:

function! TabMessage(cmd)
  redir => message
  silent execute a:cmd
  redir END
  tabnew
  silent put=message
  set nomodified
endfunction
command! -nargs=+ -complete=command TabMessage call TabMessage(<q-args>)

Now the output from Ruby is put into a new tab. However, I can't get it to pop up in a new, separate window. Changing tabnew to new just sends the output to a split in the same window.

The other problem is that a visible ^M gets appended to the end of each line, so the output ends up looking like this, which is kind of bothersome:

Hello World!^M

So, is there any way to get the output into a separate window without the ^M appended to the end? Are there any plugins I should be using in order to achieve this Textmate-like effect for code output?

Answer 1

It sounds like you're using MacVim, so try this:

:w !ruby | mvim -c "set nomodified" -

Assuming you have the mvim script somewhere in your path, that will execute the contents of the current buffer, then pipe the output into an instance of MacVim running in a new OS X window (vs. a new Vim window). The new buffer is marked unmodified to avoid warnings when you try to close it without saving.

More info:

:help macvim
:help mvim

Answer 2

A couple of suggestions:

1. Why is :!ruby foo.rb not working for you? Assuming your vim is running in a scrollable window? Or how about :!ruby foo.rb > foo.out, followed by :e foo.out After that you'll have 2 buffers open, the original file you were working in & the results from running ruby. You can do all sorts of things with buffers (open the buffers in a split window, etc). Check out :help :buffer for more options in this area.
2. If vim was compiled with ruby support (+ruby) you can use ruby commands in vim, such as :ruby {cmd}. Check out :help :ruby for more info on this.
3. You may be better served installing rails.vim and possibly some other vim packages. The Biodegradeable Geek has a nice writeup on using VIM as a Ruby on Rails IDE