 Tip #95: How do I pipe the output from ex commands into the text buffer?
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August 7, 2001 10:56 |
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complexity: |
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intermediate |
| author: |
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Anonymous |
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as of Vim: |
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6.0 |
This is a *request* for a tip. I need to be able to pipe the output of a :blah ex command into the vim text buffer for editing. I wanted to do this many times for different reasons and could never find a way!
I would just love to be able to do :hi --> textBuffer and examine the output at my own leasure scrolling up and down and using vim search commands on it. Same thing for :set all, and other things. Considering that cut and paste is horrible in windows, I can't for example do :set guioptions? then cut and paste! So I have to retype it, or cut and paste from the help manual. I really want to be able to pipe the output of ex commands into the text buffer. Can someone help me?
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Additional Notes
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Yegappan,
August 7, 2001 11:45
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You can use the :redir command to redirect the output of an ex command to
a register and then paste the contents of the register into a Vim buffer.
For example:
:redir @a
:set all
:redir END
Now, register 'a' will have the output of the "set all" ex command. You
can paste this into a Vim buffer. You can also write a Vim function
to do the above.
For more information, read :help redir
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Anonymous,
August 7, 2001 14:13
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| Wow!!! That's awesome!! Exactly what I want!
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[email protected],
July 25, 2002 11:28
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This may be obvious to experts, but it took me a very long time to figure it out, because Google searches on terms like 'pipe', 'buffer', 'shell', etc never brought it to my attention. However, you can pipe the contents of the file currently being edited (the current buffer) to a shell command, and replace the current file/buffer with the _output_ of that command, using this:
:%! [cmd]
ie, if you didn't know the :retab command (as for a long time I didn't), you could expand tabs using basic unix commands like ":%! expand -t 4". Wish I'd known this a long time ago, so I'm posting it here in the hopes that others might find it :-)
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[email protected],
February 18, 2004 14:01
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The answer is (for ex.):
:read !ls ~
and :help :read for more info :-)
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Grateful,
September 27, 2004 12:10
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| Thanks Anonymous and Yegappan, I've long wanted to do this too, but never known how. Great initiative Anonymous!
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Anonymous,
September 27, 2006 3:16
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Here's a function that pipes the output of a command into a new tab (Vim 7.0):
function! TabMessage(cmd)
redir => message
silent execute a:cmd
redir END
tabnew
silent put=message
set nomodified
endfunction
command! -nargs=+ -complete=command TabMessage call TabMessage(<q-args>)
Example usage:
:TabMessage highlight
Another alternative is to use Dredir function in the Decho script, http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=120
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