Oh dear god this has been discussed to death. Bram has spoken - vim is an editor. It is not a shell. It does not support shell features. Period. It is not your editor - feel free to fork it or maintain a patchset which supports shell features in vim.
I see *nothing* that another terminal cannot do. To examine some of the previous excuses: * But I have to move the mouse to the other terminal! Get a better WM, or try GNU screen. Don't blame vim because your specific setup causes problems when switching applications. I can switch to another window in less keypresses that it takes to switch to a vim window under default keybindings. GNU screen is actually the same number of keypresses. If you want to avoid the mouse, avoid it. * But I'm on windows and I can't use another terminal because it's windows! Yeah, and if all these other people have difficulty making a proper terminal in a win32 environment, it makes total sense that vim should be able to do it... are you people serious? If you can't run a second shell on windows because they all suck (they do), then how do you expect vim to do any better? * But emacs can do it! Emacs can also clean my house if I ask it nice enough. No one is forcing you to use vim - feel free to use emacs if this is an important feature. Simply put: if your excuse is "but X can do it!" then use X. * Everyone wants it though! Bram doesn't. And "everyone" doesn't seem to be providing code. If you're dead serious about this, go ahead and code it up - oh and make sure it's does proper terminal emulation on win32, POSIX systems, and also supports serial consoles, as I don't want your patch forcing me not to use vim on my vt420 in the other room. * But, but, but! Too bad. Those who want this feature are deluded. You think that integrating a terminal into vim is going to make your lives easier. It won't you will gain nothing.
