Nautilus open text file with vim and make terminal persist after closing

Question

I would like to open a (text) file with Vim in nautilus. This part is easy: Right-Click -> Open With Vim starts a terminal with vim inside running, file open already.

When I close vim, the terminal closes too. I would like the terminal to remain open, with the working directory set to the directory the file is in.

I'm sure there is a simple way to achieve this by creating a custom bash script and adding it to the context menu (or even as the default action on Enter when the file is selected) but I don't know how. So, How to do this?

I am on ubuntu 18.04 but I hope it is similar for later versions.

Answer 1

Maybe not exactly what you want, but the following script does the thing you want, when put as a Nautilus script under the ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/ directory:

#!/bin/bash
file=$(echo "$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS" | head -1)
dir=$(dirname "$file")
##zenity --info --no-wrap --no-markup --title="DEBUG" --text="$file : $dir"
gnome-terminal -- /bin/bash -c "/bin/vim \"$file\" ; cd \"$dir\" ; exec /bin/bash"

Usage: Please, add the above script contents as a new file with a meaningful name (like VIM) under the ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/ directory. Then, using Nautilus, select a single text file, right click and on the popup menu select Scripts → VIM.

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^{Disclaimer: Tested only under Ubuntu 21.10}

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If you want to insert the above functionality into the vim.desktop file provided by the system, you can "localize" the contents of this file by copying it to the directory ~/.local/share/applications/ and changing the line Exec=vim %F to call your custom shell script which can be created based on the script I provided above (Hint: Replace the line file=… in my script with file="$1" in your new script.)