How do you deal with :terminal replacing your current buffer (it close it when you exit the shell). And the fact that as far as I can tell none of your keybindings work when you're inside :terminal?
Here's my terminal mappings: https://github.com/hhsnopek/dotfiles/blob/master/.nvimrc#L93
Otherwise I use neovim-remote (https://github.com/mhinz/neovim-remote), which will soon be natively in neovim, but until then you can connect to your vim instance and either create a new buffer or replace the existing one. You perform your things and then use `:w | bp` and jump back a buffer if you created a new one.
Similarly my keybindings can be mapped just as I did in my dotfiles (first link). Probably my favorite part is being able to search my terminal instance in vim style with `/` and navigate as I would in any other file
