When opening an existing session and an existing file at the same time, the focus goes to the last opened file in the session

Question

When doing this:

vim -S Session.vim OTHER_FILE

The shown buffer contains the last opened file in the Session.vim and not the file OTHER_FILE. I find this behavior a bit disturbing, I would have found it more coherent to show the content of the file OTHER_FILE. (OTHER_FILE does not appear in the Session.vim file)

After reading the Vim documentation, it appears that session files are loaded after having opened other files provided by arguments. So if the session contains an edit statement, this is logical that the shown buffer contains the file of that edit statement.

With the help of the following function, it now shows the last file provided by argument:

function! GoToLastArgumentFile()                                                                  
    let l:current_buf_id = bufnr('%')                                           
    let l:highest_buf_id = l:current_buf_id                                     
                                                                                
    for buf_id in range(1, bufnr('$'))                                          
        if bufexists(buf_id) && l:current_buf_id != buf_id && bufloaded(buf_id) 
            let l:highest_buf_id = buf_id                                       
        endif                                                                   
    endfor                                                                      
                                                                                
    if l:highest_buf_id < l:current_buf_id                                      
        execute ":buffer ".l:highest_buf_id                                     
    endif                                                                       
endfunction 

And also by adding this line in the .vimrc file:

autocmd! VimEnter * :call GoToLastArgumentFile()

I am pretty new at vim script, I found that solution a bit complicated and I was wondering if there was any better way to change the default behavior ?

Answer 1

You can cheat a little using this method:

vim -S Session.vim -c ":e OTHER_FILE"

This will source your Session.vim then load the file you want. From what I have read in the man page, the commands specified with -c will be executed last:

+{command}
-c {command}
    {command} will be executed after the first file has been read. {command} is interpreted
    as an Ex command. If the {command} contains spaces it must be enclosed in double quotes 
    (this depends on the shell that is used). Example: Vim "+set si" main.c
    Note: You can use up to 10 "+" or "-c" commands. 

It won't change the initial behaviour of vim but it will always work.