Windowless Vimrun.exe

This program is meant to replace the original vimrun.exe provided with GVim for Windows. The original vimrun.exe will make a console window flash in the background which is annoying and slows down command execution.

This version of vimrun.exe is able to execute a command in the background without flashing a window when the -s flag is provided.

Installation

Download the vimrun.exe binary (available in 32 bit and 64 bit).
Drop it anywhere in your PATH before GVim's directory or simply replace the original vimrun.exe.
add the following commands to your .vimrc:

:set shellxescape-=\>
:set shellxescape-=\&

These are used to tell VIm which characters to escape when sending commands to the shell (cmd.exe). Unfortunately many plug-ins are not using these correctly and end up escaping output redirection commands which then cause them to fail... I'm not sure why this works when using the default vimrun.exe, maybe some 'helpful' Microsoft compatibility magic is taking place when using the system() API call...

Limitations:

This program has some limitations and requires cmd.exe to be used as shell (which is the default setting in Windows based GVim installations).

Explanation:

Supported usage (same as the original vimrun.exe):

vimrun.exe [-s] executable [parameters]

When the -s flag is not provided Windowless Vimrun will allow executable to show its window and will assume executable to be cmd.exe compatible and will simply add && pause at the end of parameters...

This is not satisfactory but does the trick until I spend more time on this to find a better solution.

Pull request are very much welcomed!

Building:

This can be built manually using MinGW:

git clone https://github.com/2072/Windowless-vimrun.git
cd Windowless-vimrun
make

Acknowledgements

This program is inspired from vimrun-silent written by Leonid Shevtsov and released under the MIT License.