RSync on save in VIM

Question

I\'m looking for a way to map the :w command so that when I use it, it will rsync the current directory and save the file in question. Ideally, the response generated by the rsy

Answer 1

You can setup buffer local autocommands to do this (see :help autocmd-buflocal)

This sets vim to invoke rsync after each write to the buffer.

au BufWritePost,FileWritePost  silent !rsync -a /path/to/somedir/ user@host:/remote/dir/ --exclude=*.sw?

One caveat is that you must set one of these autocommands for each file you edit in a multi-file project. That gets cumbersome and it's easy to forget to set this up for new files/buffers - off course, you can setup a normal autocommand but then you have rsync firing off for writes to files not in the project.

With rsync-over-ssh, this works if the remotehost is accessible over a low-latency link - and perhaps not so well otherwise as each write blocks the buffer from futher updates until rsync has completed. To make the experience better, I recommend either

• Reusing an SSH connection using connection-multiplexing over a persistent connection.
• Sending rsync into the background by appending a & at the end of the command. YMMV.