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In my current vim session, I would like to open a new terminal window and immediately execute the cd command in that terminal to change to a specific directory. I have tried

:terminal cd /home/me/folder

But this does not work, and gives me the message

executing job failed: No such file or directory

How can I do this?

James Hungerford
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    I'm surprised that fails. Perhaps because cd is a builtin shell command. If there's really no direct way to do this I'd probably use a workaround like a custom command: com! -nargs=1 Cdterm lcd <args> | term. Then :Cdterm somedir. – B Layer Aug 09 '20 at 20:59
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    Duplicate of this question: https://vi.stackexchange.com/q/19867/71 – Christian Brabandt Aug 10 '20 at 06:34
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    If relevant, try using https://github.com/kassio/neoterm in neovim. No such problems. – eyal karni Aug 10 '20 at 09:38

1 Answers1

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I agree with B Layer's comment: It fails because cd is a builtin command in most modern systems. That means it does not exist as a standalone command such as /bin/echo and /usr/bin/gcc.

Then, a workaround is to invoke the shell to execute the command.

:ter sh -c "cd /home/me/folder;sh"

If sh does not resolve to your preferred shell, substitute it by the latter, for example, Bash:

:ter bash -c "cd /home/me/folder;bash"

As you can see, the shell is invoked again at the end, because the first shell would quit immediately after executing cd, leaving an unmodified and useless terminal buffer behind.

Quasímodo
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    Awesome, thanks! – James Hungerford Aug 12 '20 at 21:45
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    Now that I think about it, even if cd wasn't a built-in, I don't think :terminal cd would have the effect I want, since it would only leave you with a window showing an "empty" buffer, and the shell would have been exited, which isn't really what I wanted anyway. So to me, the key here is really invoking the the shell a second time as you are doing above. – James Hungerford Aug 12 '20 at 22:04
  • @JamesHungerford You are welcome! Yes, I imagined that was your case. You may want to [edit] the question to explicitly include the requirement of staying with the shell after executing the cd command. The linked duplicate question does not seem to have that requirement. – Quasímodo Aug 12 '20 at 23:54