at a previous job, i wrote a vim script to take the current line or selected line, and to send it plus newline to a specific term in vim. so there was a buffer i was writing with all the commands i was doing, and i had the ability to get the current command executing in the term, which i could also see on screen, in a different split. i think about this script some, but haven't recreated it.<p>i thought it was especially nice for some of the sql experimentation i was doing. whether my term was in a shell or in psql, the script would work the same.<p>rather than try to make all my terminal programs behave like vim, the idea was to make vim my primary way of editing commands. the eclim plugin for eclipse works sort of similarly-ish (albiet it is way way more complex): you can open a vim session that knows about & integrates with the eclipse session, but you can stay in vim, versus trying to enrich eclipse. this is the headless mode of eclim- there is also a headed mode where vim is embedded into eclipse.