Have you tried xterm? It takes a bit longer to configure, as its defaults are universally horrible, but I've found the result to be worth the effort. FWIW, it has this feature you are talking about as part of it's "print" functionality. I bound ctrl-shift-P to print-everything() and then set printerCommand to `xterm -class modal -e sh -c 'vim +"setlocal buftype=nofile" +"g/^$/d" +"normal G$" - <&3' 3<&` (which might be crazy; I didn't think through it for very long). You can use printAttributes to tell it to include the format escape sequences, though (personally) I have that turned off for this purpose (as I find it makes it more difficult to search in my editor; but, again: I didn't spend much time on the editor side of this arrangement).
Hmm I'll have to look into this. After some basic playing around with this feature it might be workable. In my head I had my editor taking over the current program in the terminal, and after exiting it would return to the previous program, but that involves some backgrounding and job manipulation that I haven't given too much thought. Thanks for the tip.
