Using Vim/Gvim with multiple GUI windows

Is it possible to have 2 or more (G)vim windows for the same session, or at least share some buffers. Here, "window" refers to a Gnome(or KDE, or Windows etc.) window, not a VIM window.

I use two monitors with xinerama and want to open two separate GUI windows instead of having a huge single one that spans multiple screens.

Solution 1:

Currently gVim cannot have separate 'toplevel' windows for the same process/session. There is a TODO item to implement an inter-process communication system between multiple Vim instances to make it behave as though the separate processes are unified. (See :help todo and search for "top-level".)

Solution 2:

Take a look at GNU screen used in conjunction with Vim.

First window, start up gnu screen and vim

xterm
screen -S edit
vim

Second window, connect to screen session:

xterm
screen -x edit

Incredibly useful over large xinerama desktops, multiple virtual screens, or VNC sessions. One session of Vim, with lots of tabs, is all you need.

-- Tom

Solution 3:

It's been some time since you asked your question and many things have improved. Nvidia has much better driver support for multiple monitors on Linux.
I've now stopped using Gvim since I moved over to KDE: Now I'm using vim-qt. It allows you to open multiple instances, in case you don't want to use vim in the terminal.

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