Making terminal buffer unlisted

Question

I'm configuring my scripts to work with terminal in VIM and have a question regarding :h special-buffers. Among mentioned kinds there were the following:

unlisted    The buffer is not in the buffer list.  It is not used for
            normal editing, but to show a help file, remember a file name
            or marks.  The ":bdelete" command will also set this option,
            thus it doesn't completely delete the buffer.  Settings: >
            :setlocal nobuflisted

terminal    A terminal window buffer, see |terminal|. The contents cannot
            be read or changed until the job ends.

---

Currently I create a terminal buffer with the function

function! CreateTerminalInstance()
    execute "terminal ++hidden" 
    return bufnr("$")
endfunction

then stores the bufnr of the terminal and use it throughout the session.

The problem is when switching between buffers containing code to be displayed in some window with :bnext it sometimes displays the terminal in the window. This is because the terminal appears in the buffer list:

So I considered making this buffer with :setlocal nobuflisted, but it looks hacky since now the terminal buffer has two kinds: terminal and unlisted as I show above.

What is the preferred way to achieve switching between buffers corresponding to regular opened files?

Answer 1

First, your function can be simplified into

let bufnr = term_start(&shell, {"hidden": 1})

Second, it's not a problem to have buftype ==# 'terminal' and set nobuflisted together, as these are two different options. So

if bufnr
    call setbufvar(bufnr, "buflisted", 0)
endif

is very much okay. However, the real question is: why you create a terminal at all if you are never going to show it? Maybe, you want job_start() instead?