toggle-terminal

A plugin to make a toggleable terminal in Neovim.

Usage

Alt + ; opens a terminal window while in normal and insert mode.

By default, it is a 10 lines height, horizontal split window, at the bottom of the screen.

Once the terminal is open, pressing again Alt + ; will close the terminal. It will close if we are in the terminal buffer, in terminal mode or in normal mode, and also if we are in any other window open.

The terminal buffer is by default unlisted so you are not going to find it with the :ls or :bnext.

To reopen it Alt + ;.

Manual Installation

Are we installing a plugin or a package? Are we using Neovim or Lua to handle it?

As a Plugin using Neovim

toggle-terminal has all its functionality in a single file. So it could be installed as a plugin as for the definition of the User Manual.

A plugin is nothing more than a Vim script file that is loaded automatically when Vim starts. You can add a plugin very easily by dropping it in your plugin directory.

:help plugin

The file can be also written in Lua in Neovim.

Where is the plugin directory?

The "base" (root) directories conform to the XDG Base Directory Specification.

 /.../
 CONFIG DIRECTORY (DEFAULT)
                   $XDG_CONFIG_HOME            Nvim: stdpath("config")
     Unix:         ~/.config                   ~/.config/nvim
     Windows:      ~/AppData/Local             ~/AppData/Local/nvim

 DATA DIRECTORY (DEFAULT) ~
                   $XDG_DATA_HOME              Nvim: stdpath("data")
     Unix:         ~/.local/share              ~/.local/share/nvim
     Windows:      ~/AppData/Local             ~/AppData/Local/nvim-data

:help base-directories

A plugin installed by the user falls in the category of DATA. The recommended directory in the Manual is:

Unix		~/.local/share/nvim/site/plugin

Neovim adds an extra level the site folder.

Files inside plugin directories are executed, sourced, automatically at startup. Including any Lua or Vim files inside subdirectories.

So installing toggle-terminal is copying toggle-terminal.lua into the ~/.local/share/nvim/site/plugin directory.

~/.local/share/nvim/site/plugin/toggle-terminal.lua

As a user, you can put the plugin file anywhere you want as long as it is in a plugin directory inside the directories in runtimepath. :help load-plugins. For example:

~/.config/nvim/plugin/toggle-terminal.lua

As a Package using Neovim

Packages are loaded. These are plugins, as above, but found in the "start" directory of each entry in 'packpath'. Every plugin directory found is added in 'runtimepath' and then the plugins are sourced. See |packages|.

:help load-plugins

TODO...