How can I use a vim plugin for a filetype that the plugin is not intended for?

Question

If you convert a Jupyter Notebook to a markdown document (with pandoc, for example) then it's nice and easy to edit it without having to launch the browser. I enjoy the vim-markdown plugin for this work.

I have since found the jupyter-vim plugin, which can send python code snippets directly from vim to a jupyter-qtconsole (far more light-weight than the Jupyter notebook). My problem is that vim only activates the jupyter-vim plugin for a "python" filetype, so I can't use it when editing a markdown file. But I don't see any reason I shouldn't be able to use the plugin from a markdown file to send the qtconsole code snippets from a fenced python code block, for exampe.

I'm almost sure there's a way to do this, but I have not figured it out. I tried, for example, making a 'markdown' directory in the ~/.vim/bundle/jupyter-vim/ftplugin/ directory. But I'm shooting in the dark. I can't see how to do this in vim help for :h filetype-plugins.

Any ideas would be most welcome...!

Answer 1

After looking in ~/.vim/bundle/jupyter-vim/plugin/jupyter.vim, I found the call I needed that initializes the jupyter plugin.

In vim, with my markdown file open, I just need to :call jupyter#load#MakeStandardCommands().

Now it works -- I essentially have a Jupyter Notebook running in vim!

If you do this you'll probably also want to

let g:jupyter_cell_separators = ['```']

in .vimrc. Then a fenced code block is run like a cell in Jupyter.