Piping buffer to external command in Vim

vim pipe external
yasar picture yasar · Oct 23, 2011 · Viewed 28.8k times · Source

I am kind of a Vim novice. I would like to send contents of the current buffer to stdin of external command (lets say mail). My final purpose is to set a shortcut to quickly send email from current Vim buffer. I am guessing this should be a trivial stuff, but I couldn't find a way to send Vim buffer to an external command. Thanks in advance.

Answer

John Kugelman picture John Kugelman · Oct 23, 2011

You can use :w !cmd to write the current buffer to the stdin of an external command. From :help :w_c:

:[range]w[rite] [++opt] !{cmd}

Execute {cmd} with [range] lines as standard input (note the space in front of the '!'). {cmd} is executed like with ":!{cmd}", any '!' is replaced with the previous command |:!|.

A related command is :%!cmd which does the same thing and then replaces the current buffer with the output of the command. So :%!sort would invoke the external sort command to sort the current buffer in place.

Related questions

Vim: Pipe selected text to shell cmd and receive output on vim info/command line

I want to pipe the selected text to a shell command and receive the one-line output from this shell command on the vim info/command line? What I'm really trying to do: Pipe the selected text to a pastebin-type shell …

Read More
How do I exit the Vim editor?

I'm stuck and cannot escape. It says: "type :quit<Enter> to quit VIM" But when I type that it simply appears in the object body.

Read More
How do I make Git use the editor of my choice for commits?

I would prefer to write my commit messages in Vim, but it is opening them in Emacs. How do I configure Git to always use Vim? Note that I want to do this globally, not just for a single project.

Read More