Is there a way to run an ex command without hitting colon first?

Question

I am doing some scripting related to tmux and Vim. In my tmux window, I have Vim in one tmux pane and a Tcl command line in another tmux pane.

I want to create a Tcl proc which will dump a string to /tmp/file and then use tmux send-keys to send :read /tmp/file to the Vim pane. This is a way for the results of Tcl commands to be automatically read into my Vim buffer.

This is working fine except that I use normal mode Vim mappings where I swap the colon : and the semi-colon ;. This means that I actually want tmux send-keys to send ;read /tmp/file.

My colon/semi-colon swap means that whatever I write won't work for someone who doesn't swap colon/semi-colon.

Is it possible for an external program to discover if a open Vim window has remapped the : key? or run an Ex command without preceding it with a colon?

Answer 1

Ex commands can be executed in Ex mode. The Q key in Normal mode enters Ex mode, but this is often mapped to a no-operation by users to avoid Ex mode entirely. In fact, $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim now remaps Q to gq.

But Vim being Vim, there's yet another way to enter Ex mode. gQ will enter Ex mode and will update the buffer after each command.

My Tcl proc can now include this code to tell Vim in another tmux pane to read a tmp file:

    set keys "gQread $tmp_file"
    lappend keys "C-m"
    lappend keys "visual" "C-m"

    exec tmux send-keys -t $target {*}$keys