Using Vim as external editor using only one instance

Question

I'm playing a game that has a scripting language. It has a button to open the scripts in external editor. You can set the command that will trigger the editor from within the game's interface.

/usr/bin/X11/gvim opens the scripts in gvim

now what I would like to know is, if it's doable, to open the scripts in terminal's vim and if instead of opening a new one each time to add tabs to the existing instance. What would be a command to do that?

the way of adding tabs is :tabe filename or from terminal for multiple documents

vim -p file1, file2

I guess there are more that I don't know, I hope this is doable.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible with vim's server mode. Start a vim-server with:

vim --servername somename

Now you can send commands to it with --remote, --remote-send and others.

To achieve what you want, start a server with a known name, send the :tabe commands with:

vim --servername somename --remote-send ':tabe filename<cr>'

Note the same commands work for gvim. If this should work from within another program, you need to start the vim-server prior to any --remote-send commands. The edit command within the program should then be: vim --servername somename --remote-send ':tabe %s<cr>', assuming %s is replaced by the filename to edit.