My friend Grig asked me if this was possible. The answer is yes and no.
Yes, you can get a shell prompt by typing :shell
No, you cannot, as far as I can tell, get a shell in an all that useful of a fashion, like in a split VIM window for instance. It simply drops you to your shell so that you can do something and then when you Ctrl-D or exit, you’re back in you VIM session. This only seems handy if you can’t, for some reason open a new terminal window. That said, it could save your life someday, so I posted it here.
What about screen? I used to use it a lot until my company bought big widescreen monitors.
Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+N, Ctrl+”, Ctrl+Q.
:!bash is basically the same thing as :shell, in fact it probably IS the same. I would like to have a shell in a scratch window that I could resize and place to aid me in whatever task I am doing at the time, so far, I have not found VIM capable of this. There is always the option to just open another terminal window, which of course works fine, so It’s not really worth complaining about or taking the time and writing the plugin to do it.
how about :!bash
or any :!command directly, for that matter
you can even put the output into your text with :.!command
I often use that for sorting: select text, and do :’!sort
Why not just put the vim session in the background with ^Z ?
Yeh, I agree. This is not really a very useful implementation of shell.