Looking for a centred, full-screen terminal

Question

There exist out there several different 'distraction-free editors' for writing: these provide a fullscreen, minimal environment with the goal of forcing oneself to focus on the task at hand.

I want to do something similar with vim. While I can simply fire it up in a terminal and then press F11 to put it to fullscreen, I also want to limit the width to around 75 characters and centre the area I'm using.

Think about how word processors provide a virtual page in the middle of the program -- that's what I want. Sort of.

Is there a way to do this, either with a special terminal program or with some setting in vim? If one of the GUI vim programs have this capability, or if there's any other way of doing it that I haven't thought of, that would also be a useful answer.

Answer 1

If you start screen in a maximized xterm (Alt-Enter in xterm) as:

screen -c this-file

Where this-file contains:

focusminsize 75 25
split -v
focus
only
split -v
split -v
focus

You'll get a center region of width 75.

Answer 2

An alternative is to use a program such as devilspie to accomplish this. In case you've never heard of devilspie:

excerpt

A window-matching utility, inspired by Sawfish's “Matched Windows” option and the lack of the functionality in Metacity. Metacity lacking window matching is not a bad thing — Metacity is a lean window manager, and window matching does not have to be a window manager task.

Devil's Pie can be configured to detect windows as they are created, and match the window to a set of rules. If the window matches the rules, it can perform a series of actions on that window. For example, I can make all windows created by X-Chat appear on all workspaces, and the main Gkrellm1 window does not appear in the pager or task list.

It should be in most distros' repos.

Example

So to center a xterm window running vim inside of it you'd do the following.

1. Make your Devil's Pie config. dir.

   $ mkdir ~/.devilspie
   

2. Create a .ds file specifying you're Devil's Pie rule

   $ cat ~/.devilspie/something.ds 
   (if
       (matches (application_name) "vim")
       (begin
           (geometry "600x400")
           (center)
       )
   )
   

3. Run devilspie. I like to run it debug mode (-d) to start.

   $ devilspie -d
   Devil's Pie 0.22 starting...
   Loading /etc/devilspie
   /etc/devilspie doesn't exist
   Loading /home/saml/.devilspie
   Loading /home/saml/.devilspie/something.ds
   1 s-expressions loaded.
   

4. Run our xterm with vim.

   $ xterm -e vim
   

    

What's my window's name?

You can use the command xlsclient -l to get a list of open windows. I find it the easiest way to determine a window's name for incorporation into devilspie. You might also want to make use of xwininfo too.

Example

$ xlsclients -l|less
...
Window 0x6800023:
  Machine:  grinchy
  Name:  vim
  Icon Name:  vim
  Command:  xterm -e vim
  Instance/Class:  xterm/XTerm
...

You can control a windows name like this:

$ xterm -title WeirdWindow -e vim

References

• Devilspie - Ubuntu Documentation
• Devil's Pie - GNOME wiki
• Devil's Pie - burtonini.com
• Devil's Pie documentation - foosel.org

Answer 3

There's a plugin for Vim called VimRoom which provides this via a mapping (default is V).