How to display Vim "bang" output below editor window instead of popping out to terminal?

Question

Numerous sources indicate that running a "bang" command such as :! wc % will display the results in Vim below the editor window. (For instance, this tip sheet states that as the expected behavior.)

Specifically, I'm following along with this Vimcast tutorial on Tim Pope's Fugitive plugin, and in that Drew Neil states that running the :Git command will allow the user to run any arbitrary git command from inside Vim--and the output of the command will be displayed within Vim at the bottom of the screen.

This is not the behavior I am experiencing. Instead my Vim session is in essence sent to the background, and I'm popped back to my terminal to see the output. It's all very disorienting--specifically because I lose the useful visual context provided by my Vim session including the "bang" command that generated the output.

I'd love it if Vim actually did display the externally generated output in Vim below the editor window. I found some similar types of questions, but in all of them the user wanted to output the content to a new buffer rather than just see it momentarily printed at the bottom of the editor window. In other words, I've not found anyone else describing the behavior I'm seeing.

I was able to get the desired behavior in gVim, but gVim isn't always a viable option, so I'd like to know whether there is a broader solution that will allow the expected behavior in terminal-based Vim.

I'm using Vim 8.0 on Ubuntu 16.04. My terminal is gnome-terminal with the zsh shell. I tried some other terminals on my machine and the bash shell, and I'm experiencing this behavior regardless of which combination I use.

Here are two screenshots that demonstrate the behavior I'm seeing. On the left is a terminal-based Vim, and on the right is gVim. Notice how running :! wc % has the expected/desired behavior in gVim on the right, but not in regualar Vim on the left.

Screenshot before running command:

Screenshot after running command:

Is anyone else experiencing this? Does anyone else get the desired behavior from their terminal-based Vim? (Perhaps this is all some kind of documentation oversight and terminal-based Vim was never expected to behave in the desired way?)

Thanks!

Answer 1

It's GVim (or MacVim) that shows the output of external command at the bottom of the window because it comes with a very minimal terminal emulator. Plain Vim is incapable of doing that.

You could emulate that behavior with tmux via any of the many Vim plugins that provide tmux integration or, since you are using Vim 8.0, the new built-in :help :terminal emulator.

For your example:

:term wc %