Is there an easier way?

[bcm0]

Unfortunately this issue lead to nothing:
neovim/neovim#8805

Still no vimlike editing in nvim's terminal.
Please let me know if there's a more comfortable way of doing it.

[matu3ba]

The main problem is that the command prompt content is stored within the shell repl and neovim "does not know what is inside".

There are a few options to implement this upstream:

• 1. replicate the shell tab completion behavior to keep the shell prompt content in sync with a nvim-local buffer (This does rule out variable expansion/some shells offer)
• 2. intercept at the emulator level and try to parse escape codes for the correct info https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40428890/how-do-programs-that-redraw-the-terminal-work (Complex and very error prone. Also escape codes are already a terrible security problem.)
• 3. make a shell, which internal state can be queried from (at least the important bits): A shell becomes easily horribly complex as its a stateful repl around system behavior with ridiculous edge cases.
• 4. hack up an existing shell or support exposing this internal data

Work around the problem (with the subset of shell supporting shell instance-specific history for example in /tmp/history_pid):

• For shared history: lock the shells history file until the last command has been written.
• For individual history per shell: Teach neovim how to find the history file (we can track when the log changed and compare against when in command prompt stuff got executed)
• User can then build lua functions to write to terminal and read back the history + deleting last history entry.

[matu3ba]

Shells are hard and commitee and operating systems stuff on top unnecessary complexity originally created for a time when IPC was too expensive to have multiple communication channels between processes.

There is a project trying to fix the IPC side with horrible escape codes at least.