How do you disable saving in vim unless you quit as well?

Question

You are probably wondering what I could possibly need this for?

Well, my program will sometimes deal with erroneous strings that need to be manually fixed. So what I do, is I create a process which opens up a Vim, and suspends my program until a signal is emitted in which the file is changed (i.e. saved). I don't want to accidentally save without quitting; that would cause issues.

So is it possible to launch vim in which it is not possible to save without quitting?

Answer 1

You could play with the write option. From :h 'write':

'write'         boolean (default on)
            global
            {not in Vi}
    Allows writing files.  When not set, writing a file is not allowed.
    Can be used for a view-only mode, where modifications to the text are
    still allowed.  Can be reset with the |-m| or |-M| command line
    argument.  Filtering text is still possible, even though this requires
    writing a temporary file.

So maybe you could use set nowrite in your vimrc: this will prevent any saving command to work (using autocommands to set nowrite on specific files would be even more efficient). And you can create a mapping to allow writing, something like nnoremap <key> :set write<CR> to enable write when to press the key or nnoremap <key> :set write!<CR> to toggle write/nowrite on each keypress.

Answer 2

As you have stated in the comments that you need to prevent the automatic saves you perform under muscle memory, you could just remap the particular combination(s) that you perform without thinking.

e.g.

nnoremap :w<cr> <nop>

You can start Vim with this mapping in place by using the "-c" command line option:

vim -c "nnoremap :w<cr> <nop>" no_saves_allowed.txt

Answer 3

You could key an event to an Autocommand:

autocmd BufWritePost :q

This will quit if you ever try to write the buffer.

EDIT: Got it the wrong way around, thought you wanted to not be able to quit without saving. Also BufWritePost rather than BufWrite will wait with quitting Vim until it's made sure the entire file is saved.

PS: A complete list of the autocommand events can be found on :h autocmd-events