How do you open a session in an existing server?

Question

I'm using the server mode in vim and already have an instance open with a couple of files in. I'd like to add the contents of a session file to this.

However doing vim --servername vim -S mySessionFile ends up opening it in a new server (VIM1 - from doing :echo v:servername).

I also tried vim --servername vim --remote-silent -S .\vimSession which opened in the correct instance but perhaps not surprisingly just added two new buffers for the final two arguments.

This also doesnt work:vim --servername vim -S .\vimSession --remote-silent! It complains of missing arguments (its expecting a file list), and if you add one in then it just ignores the session parameter and gives a blank buffer with the name

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Quick and dirty way of "storing a list of open files", as requested in your comment. (I don't have enough reputation to answer a comment).

:tabs

gives all currently open filenames, arranged by tab number.

So if you do something like

 command! SaveTabs :execute "redir! > tabs_" . v:servername . ".txt 
     \ | echo v:servername strftime(\"%c\") | pwd | tabs | redir END"

you will have a new command

:SaveTabs

which will create a file named something like tabs_GVIM27.txt (yeah that's how many servers I have open...) containing all the filenames, with a "header" at the top with the:

• servername
• current working directory
• date/time that the list was created.

When in a new/different session later on, you can open the tabs file in a window and <c-w>f on any of those filenames to open a new split on the file, effectively "importing" it into your current session.

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Variations:

• If you want you could put the date/time in the filename itself, see :help strftime()
• Put the list on the clipboard instead of in a file: use redir @+ instead of redir! >

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Other explanatory notes:

• The working directory is because :tabs shows relative paths, so files in the working directory do not have their paths (but others do)
• :execute is needed because :redir won't allow variables in its argument
• The command doesn't have to be split over two lines, I just did that so it would be easier to read here

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Insane variation for importing all the files at once:

If you want to import all the files at once you can probably do something like

grep "^  " tabs_OLD.txt | xargs | vim --servername NEW --remote-silent

(untested but you get the idea)

(actually if you got that working, you could then just define it as an alias in your shell, so you could in future just type

addfiles foo bar

to add all the files from a previous vim server "foo" to a currently-running vim server called "bar")