VIM and FTP haven’t really been the greatest couple in my experience. While it does work, it tends to give me disconnected errors after being idle a while rather than handling it itself. Usually, attempting the operation again works just fine. However, there are times where not even that works and I keep receiving the disconnected error (this often happens after the net went down and I restarted the interface).

When I was using Gentoo, and hadn’t installed the ftp command-line application yet, I noticed VIM complained about not having it. So I figured, what if I killed ftp when VIM was complaining about connection problems:

killall ftp

When you do so, VIM may display a message stating that a process was killed. That’s a good thing. Attempt your operation again and everything should work properly. This saves a lot of time - not having to restart VIM (especially if you work with as many splits and tabs as I do; saving the session doesn’t do much justice).

Hope this little trick is of some help.