How to use "tail -f" in Vim's 8.1 :terminal command window?

[Igor]

Hi,

I installed Vim 8.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 using PPA.

1. Now I am editing myfile.txt file in vim.

2. I opened new terminal windows inside vim

with command: :terminal

3. New terminal opens. I typed in:

tail -f myfile.txt

4. I moved back to ordinary Vim window:

Ctrl+w

5. I type in some text and save with :w

PROBLEM: I expect terminal windows refreshes

because of tail -f command, but actually

nothing really happens in :terminal window.

If this is working this would be super-powerful

feature using vim and ssh.

Any idea?

Thanks

[Matteo Landi]

Did you try the same, tail - f, but from outside vim?

If not wrong, vim is dumping the whole buffer to the file on save (not 'appending' new content) so I wouldn't be surprised it tail - f did not work because of it.

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[Brian L. Matthews]

On 11/23/19 10:12 AM, Matteo Landi wrote:
> Did you try the same, tail - f, but from outside vim?
>
> If not wrong, vim is dumping the whole buffer to the file on save
(not 'appending' new content) so I wouldn't be surprised it tail - f did
not work because of it.
>

And I think by default vim renames the current file then writes to a
completely new file, so the file you're tailing never changes, in fact
it gets deleted. You can modify that behavior with various options
(backup, writebackup, backupcopy). I got tail -f to show something by
setting nobackup (which is the default) and nowritebackup (which isn't),
then modifying a file I was tailing. Because of the way tail works, this
would only do something useful if you're just adding lines to the file,
but it does work.

Brian

[Bram Moolenaar]

It works fine for me. It might indeed depend on the value of
'backupcopy'.

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/// Bram Moolenaar -- Br...@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
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[Gua Chung Lim]

* Bram Moolenaar <Br...@moolenaar.net> wrote:
>
> It works fine for me. It might indeed depend on the value of
> 'backupcopy'.

I also tried 'set bkc=yes' in vimrc, it works. But it is not very responsive. Sometimes, tail -f didn't update the changes. But most of the time it does.

--
Gua Chung Lim

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system,
but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
-- Dennis M. Ritchie