How to echo a command but avoid the “hit enter” prompt

Question

I have found how to silently execute a command with :silent, but I actually would like to echo the command being executed, without getting into this "hit-enter" prompt. How to do it?

My example is a function for synctex forward search, put into my vimrc:

function! SyncTexForward()
    " use file path relative to current directory
    let execstr = "silent !zathura --synctex-forward ".line(".").":".col(".").":".@%." ".fnamemodify(@%, ":r") . ".pdf &"
    exec execstr
endfunction

Without silent, it would display the command + its output, that is one line with the pid, like this:

:!zathura --synctex-forward 612:1:myfile.tex myfile.pdf &
[1] 4648

Press ENTER or type command to continue

I tried temporarily changing &cmdheight to 2, but it has the same effect as silent (no echo at all)

Answer 1

So my question was quite stupid actually. It sufficed to add:

echo execstr

just before

exec execstr

Now if I could also capture the shell stdout and display it too, it would also be nice.