I used to run more commands from vim, but now I personally find Ctrl-Z is usually more convenient for all the one-off commands. If I do run stuff from inside of vim, it's now usually ":w !" or ":r !" (or some custom command wrapper around those).

Oh! Ctrl-Z! I've been calling !zsh all these years, for quick shell access, and never thought of suspending vim.

Thanks for the nugget.

Put this in your zshrc, and Ctrl-Z will also resume the most recently suspended process. Really handy to just Ctrl-Z in and out of Vim.

  # Make Ctrl-z also resume background process
  fancy-ctrl-z () {
      if [[ $#BUFFER -eq 0 ]]; then
          BUFFER="fg"
          zle accept-line
      else
          zleush-input
          zle clear-screen
      fi
  }
  zle -N fancy-ctrl-z
  bindkey '^Z' fancy-ctrl-z

I don't really know zsh, but that looks like it should be

  zle flush-input

And as many other cool vim features, you can even extend that usage by combining it with other features. For instance, you can read the output of a command into the current buffer by ":r !command".

That's what I've done for years too. I didn't know about the diff, but I love that - thank you.