Programmatically determine when MacVim finishes editing a file

Question

I want to write a script that opens a specified file with MacVim and then waits until the file is closed before continuing. My original idea was:

#!/bin/sh
file="some-file.txt"
mvim $file
cat $file | pbcopy

This opens the specified file with MacVim and immediately executes the next command. I've been thinking of something incredibly hackish with lsof but I was hoping there is a better way.

If this isn't possible with plain shell script, I'm open to ideas in anything else. (AppleScript, etc.)

Answer 1

Set up an autocommand to execute the command when vim (or mvim) exits. I tested with

$ mvim -c 'au VimLeave * !cat % | pbcopy' /tmp/bar.txt

It is a little shorter to use pbcopy < %.

Be careful of what you ask for. You might change buffers, and % refers to the file when vim exits. Maybe this would be safer:

$ mvim -c 'execute "au VimLeave * !pbcopy < " . expand("%")' /tmp/bar.txt

Answer 2

MacVim has an option to not fork on startup:

-f  or  --nofork     Foreground: Don't fork when starting GUI

via mvim --help

For the above script, the following works:

#!/bin/sh
file="some-file.txt"
mvim --nofork $file
cat $file | pbcopy

GVim also has an identical option:

--nofork     Foreground. For the GUI version, Vim will not fork and
             detach from the shell it was started in.

via man gvim