equalsraf

Vim's system('string') interface is not always straightforward in Windows, its behaviour can be downright unexpected involves an intricate set of options. Its primary purpose its to execute a command in the shell (see &shell) in simple terms we can think that calling system('some command') is equivalent to spawning a process with the following arguments

[&shell, &shellcmdflag, 'some command']

and sometimes this might be true but it also might not. Consider the following examples (I'm running in gVim 7.4/Windows 8)

equalsraf

[WIP]

Windows/MSYS2

In Windows we build using the toolchain provided by MSYS2 - the resulting binaries DO NOT link against the MSYS2 runtime.

Start by installing the necessary dependencies

equalsraf

TLDR; no, libuv doesn't work in Cygwin just yet, see at the bottom.

Requirements

I tested using the master branch (9d3449852bd35c9283948186d0259c1bf73b8579 or later)

I installed the following in the cygwin setup

• gcc-c++ make cmake pkg-config libtool

equalsraf

It's been a while since I did this, so .... lets see what happens.

For starters we have this setup

• Windows 10 64 bit
• using VS code (with some cmake and C++/C extensions installed)
• installed cmake manually
• I'm doing this off two different computers, so these notes will not have output :S

Just to establish that we have everything we need to build neovim, I'm going to take the long route using cmake

equalsraf

Before you start you need a Mingw-w64 toolchain for Linux, try installing the mingw-w64 package (Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora?) or get it from the Mingw-w64 website.

Build dependencies

$ mkdir deps-mingw
$ cd deps-mingw
$ cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../cmake/mingw32-w64-cross-travis.toolchain.cmake ../third-party/
$ make
$ cd ..

equalsraf

So we still have some issues with the GUI clipboard.

My hypothesis is that because nvim is caching the has_clipboard static variable then the clipboard will always be considered as invalid and can NEVER be enabled.

Test setup

First I'm going to start nvim in a way that prevents any clipboard for working by changing the PATH.

equalsraf

Check the pull request for the changes and the main issue for discussion. If you run into trouble check the Known Errors section at the end, or drop me a comment.

Requirements

• MSVC 2015, cl should report > 19.*
• Python 2 (required by libuv to get gyp) - python 3 will not work, see the issue
• Git (required by libuv to get gyp)
• libintl
• You might need the Windows 10 SDK to be installed (unverified, please drop me a comment in #810, specially if you are in Windows8 or lower.)

equalsraf

cmake fails to find a usable lua

... even if packages for lua and all deps(mpack, bitop, lpeg) are installed. This seems to be a problem with the lua binary name in OpenBSD its called lua51, lua52, luajit51 - instead of the expected lua5.1 or just lua.

The workaround for this is to specify the binary

equalsraf

The problem

I thought this was fixed earlier, but the following fails to execute if shell=cmd.exe

:echo system('cd /d "c:\Windows"')

Take the following script

equalsraf

TLDR; it did not work, apparently the major blocker is libuv support

1. dependencies (i.e. nvim's third-party/)

Haiku already has some deps, lets use its packages. But for libvterm, etc we need to use third-party

mkdir .deps
cd .deps