Application running in foreground?

Question

Gvim has the -f option. Its man page says,

-f Foreground.    For  the  GUI  version, Vim will not fork and
                  detach from the shell it was started in.

What does this mean?

I encountered this option when trying to make the global menu work for gvim from How to get global application menu for gvim?.

I thought it would be that gvim -f file & would show gvim and gvim file & wouldn't. But they both seem to have same behavior.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 12 '13 at 19:47

1

The difference should be more apparent if you try it from a terminal without the ampersands. By default, gvim goes into the background so the user can run other commands, but -f makes it wait till the editor window closes.

answered Jun 12 '13 at 19:47

Paul

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I do not observe this behavior. I can execute other commands from terminal while running gvim -f file. Maybe you can be more explicit? – countunique Jun 12 '13 at 20:45
@Stuart, do you have an alias for gvim? what does type -a gvim tell you? – glenn jackman Jun 12 '13 at 21:11
-1 for me, you're right, my alias was blocking it. – countunique Jun 12 '13 at 21:59

Application running in foreground?

1 Answers1