Vi and Vim Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people using the vi and Vim families of text editors. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Context: I'm trying to use vim's clientserver mode on Mac OS X, using iterm2. I've compiled vim with clientserver via brew, and I've got XQuartz installed also. This is to allow continuous compilation for the vimtex plugin.
When opening vim with
vim --servername VIM
it opens vim seemingly as normal, but v:servername stays empty, and from another terminal calling vim --serverlist gives no output (not even an error). To me, it seems like vim isn't really creating a server at all?
Thanks
I had exactly the same problem when trying to get vimtex working with Skim. That is, I had vim 8 installed with --with-client-server (showing as +clientserver) and XQuartz running but --servername option was just ignored.
The solution for me was setting DISPLAY:
export DISPLAY=:0.0
After that everything worked exactly as it should.
Edit: help x11-clientserver says
The communication between client and server goes through the X server. The display of the Vim server must be specified. The usual protection of the X server is used, you must be able to open a window on the X server for the communication to work. It is possible to communicate between different systems.
:help vim8)
DISPLAY was not set. Reading through the lines, my guess is they failed because DISPLAY needs to be set for client-server to work (but it's just my guess!)
clientserver needs X11 for working. So on OSX, you have to run XQuartz. Also, be sure that your vim is not a symlink to mvim with the -v option (mvim -v would run vim in terminal mode without X11 features, from my understanding).
--servername feature?
Jan 4 '18 at 9:39
--servername, but cannot find it in the docs. Only found this issue: github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1750 (which does not mention --servername)
Jan 4 '18 at 13:19
:echo has('clientserver')when you start Vim? This should be 1 of the feature is compiled in (regardless of whether or not thev:servernameis defined).brew install vim --with-client-server, after installing xquartz though brew.brewcommand might have not worked. But before looking into that you should ensure that you know that this is the problem (which I think it is).:echo has('clientserver')gives 1