Vim Window Size, Position, and GUI Startup Options

the menus, and all <Alt> keys can be mapped. The value "yes" means that Vim will use any <Alt> keys for the menus. Some <Alt> key combinations may also do other things than selecting a menu. ============================================================================== *31.4* Vim window position and size To see the current Vim window position on the screen use: > :winpos This will only work in the GUI. The output may look like this: Window position: X 272, Y 103 ~ The position is given in screen pixels. Now you can use the numbers to move Vim somewhere else. For example, to move it to the left a hundred pixels: > :winpos 172 103 < Note: There may be a small offset between the reported position and where the window moves. This is because of the border around the window. This is added by the window manager. You can use this command in your startup script to position the window at a specific position. The size of the Vim window is computed in characters. Thus this depends on the size of the font being used. You can see the current size with this command: > :set lines columns To change the size set the 'lines' and/or 'columns' options to a new value: > :set lines=50 :set columns=80 Obtaining the size works in a terminal just like in the GUI. Setting the size is not possible in most terminals. You can start the X-Windows version of gvim with an argument to specify the size and position of the window: > gvim -geometry {width}x{height}+{x-offset}+{y-offset} {width} and {height} are in characters, {x-offset} and {y-offset} are in pixels. Example: > gvim -geometry 80x25+100+300 ============================================================================== *31.5* Various You can use gvim to edit an e-mail message. In your e-mail program you must select gvim to be the editor for messages. When you try that, you will see that it doesn't work: The mail program thinks that editing is finished, while gvim is still running! What happens is that gvim disconnects from the shell it was started in. That is fine when you start gvim in a terminal, so that you can do other work in that terminal. But when you really want to wait for gvim to finish, you must prevent it from disconnecting. The "-f" argument does this: > gvim -f file.txt The "-f" stands for foreground. Now Vim will block the shell it was started in until you finish editing and exit. DELAYED START OF THE GUI On Unix it's possible to first start Vim in a terminal. That's useful if you do various tasks in the same shell. If you are editing a file and decide you want to use the GUI after all, you can start it with: > :gui Vim will open the GUI window and no longer use the terminal. You can continue using the terminal for something else. The "-f" argument is used here to run the GUI in the foreground. You can also use ":gui -f". ============================================================================== Next chapter: |usr_32.txt| The undo tree Copyright: see |manual-copyright| vim:tw=78:ts=8:noet:ft=help:norl:

This section covers how to get and set the size of the Vim window using the `:set lines columns` command, and explains how to specify the size and position of the gvim window when starting it from the command line using the `-geometry` option. It also addresses issues with using gvim as an email editor and introduces the `-f` option to prevent gvim from disconnecting from the shell. Finally, it explains how to start the Vim GUI from within a terminal using the `:gui` command.