:ha and :hardcopy commands are not working in Neovim

Question

I am using:

• Neovim 0.9.0 (latest version) and
• Arch linux 6.2.10 (latest version)

I am using the Vim Plugged plugin manager

Recently :ha (print hardcopy) stopped working.

The error message I get is as follows:

:ha

E492: Not an editor command: ha
and:

:hardcopy  

E492: Not an editor command: hardcopy

I did not recently remove or add any plugin's that I am aware of.

Can anyone suggest why these might have stopped working? (Possibly a bug in a nvim update?)

Answer 1

So :ha(rdcopy) has been deleted from Neo Vim.

I can understand why, since it makes code refactoring for developers easiear without having to consider an infinite number of things.

Here is the workaround.

Use this function in your .vimrc file.

There is no need to save the working file to print.

Remember to change the printer name to your own printer name

The first letter of a command has to be upper case so we cannot have :ha or :hardcopy and have instead to have :Ha and :Hardcopy.

Place all of this inside your .vimrc

function! PrintBuffer()
  silent execute '!lpoptions -d HP_LaserJet_2200_LOCAL_hpcups'
  silent execute 'w !lp -n 1 -o media=a4 -o sides=two-sided-long-edge -'
endfunction


command! Ha call PrintBuffer()
command! Hardcopy call PrintBuffer()

Or use the below function to print to the default printer, again no need to save the file to print.

This time I have mapped this to :Hc

" below for instant printing to default printer
function! PrintBufferWithCR()
  silent execute 'w !lp'
endfunction

command! Hc call PrintBufferWithCR()

To find out which is your default printer use lpstat -d on the command line. `

Answer 2

Hardcopy has been removed from neovim, but it still works fine in vim.

So just keep using neovim for editing files and just use vim to generate the postscript file from terminal:

vim -c ":hardcopy > output.ps" -c ":quit" input.txt

Answer 3

The problem for me with the above answers is that they're not well-formatted - large type, not mono-spaced. And any syntax coloring is gone.

I'm on MacOS, so I have MacVim that still has the :hardcopy command, but I wanted to automate as much of the process as I could and not have to manually type and twiddle just to get my printout.

So I set it up so that can run a command from the command-line and have it switch to MacVim, print, and quit. On the Mac, the print goes to Preview, so I can just print from there.

I did this with a bit of bash and MacVim features.

1. I added the official built-in MacVim mvim command like so, along with the MacVim man pages:

export PATH="/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/bin:$PATH"
export MANPATH="/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/man:$MANPATH"

2. In my ~.bashrc file I defined the following function:

unset -f mvprt
function mvprt() {
  mvim -c ':hardcopy' -c ':sleep 500m' -c ':quit' $1
}
export -f mvprt

3. So now, I just type:

mvprt <filename>

to send my formatted output to Preview.

Next step will be to get this or something similar that I can run from inside NeoVim itself