Unix console becomes inactive after closing vim

Question

user@laptop:~$ locate file.ext | xargs vim -p
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
2 files to edit
user@laptop:~$ 

After finding files and modifying them in vim I want to save them and continue to work in unix console but I can't do that.

After vim close console just halts. No activity on any keypress. The only workaround is to close console tab and create a new one. How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

try to run it different way:

vim -p `locate file.ext`

or you can try to run reset command after your vim session, to reset terminal options to defaults:

locate file.ext | xargs vim -p; reset

Answer 2

Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal

A pipe is not a terminal as such, but have you tried fg?

Answer 3

This is what I do, after exiting vim from a piped command on Cygwin.

stty sane {enter}

Of course, you won't see that get typed, but after you hit enter, the tty will come back to life. It's a pain, but works.

I don't like the other solution here because often I am running a much more complex lookup than a file lookup. I might do something like this:

egrep -ri [pattern] * | sed -e 's:\:.*::g' | grep -v ^Binary | sort | uniq | xargs vim

In my work (10 year old fast moving codebase), this kind of search is so common that I have the first five commands in a single shell script that I pipe to vim.