Concatenate vim command after :terminal

Question

Is there any way I can concatenate a command after :terminal?

For example :terminal | <some_other_vim_command> will pass | <some_other_vim_command> to the terminal that just opened, but how can I prevent that from happening?

Answer 1

Not all Ex commands allow | to be used as a command separator, some Ex commands want to take | as an argument.

The common workaround is to use :execute to wrap those commands that do not allow | as a command separator.

See :help :bar or :help :| for more details and a list of commands that take | as an argument:

These commands see the '|' as their argument, and can therefore not be followed by another Vim command:

• :argdo
• :autocmd
• ...
• :normal
• ...
• :windo
• :write !
• :[range]!

Most Ex commands (such as :!) that take a shell command as an argument will not allow | as a command separator, since shell commands typically use | as a pipe between shell commands, so they'll pass the | literally to the shell.

Note that :terminal is not on that list (as of Vim 8.2.598) but that's just an omission in the documentation and @ChristianBrabandt offered to push a documentation patch to fix that in Vim.

The documentation in :help :| also mentions:

To be able to use another command anyway, use the :execute command.

Example (append the output of "ls" and jump to the first line):

:execute 'r !ls' | '[

And :help :execute also mentions that type of usage:

:execute can be used to append a command to commands that don't accept a |.

Example:

:execute '!ls' | echo "theend"

In your particular case, you can use:

:exe "terminal" | <some_other_vim_command>