I frequently use Vim to parse and clean up data exported from other sources. Often, I find myself running a sequence of substitute commands. I'd like to save those commands to some kind of script file, then run it on the current buffer.
An example of the commands found in sample script could be:
:%s/pattern1/pattern2/g
:%s/pattern3/pattern4/g
:v/pattern5/d
... etc
If the script were in the same directory as the current buffer file (or maybe in the .vim folder), how could I load and run these commands as if I were typing them in manually?
If you have a Vim window open and want to execute VimL on a buffer, you can do:
:source /path/to/vim/file/name.vim
Put your commands in script.vim:
:%s/pattern1/pattern2/g
:%s/pattern3/pattern4/g
:v/pattern5/d
Use it like this:
$ vim filetocleanup -s script.vim
See :help -s.
Related
I know little about Vim in terminal(Mac) and the other day I was working copy and pasting text and i think I accidently did it when in terminal. Now whenever I open terminal it instantly loads on Vim Ex mode. I know how to quit Ex mode once in terminal but is there any way i can get rid of Vim loading when I open Terminal?
Thanks
Edit: To explain further to what i mean when I open terminal.app from Utilities I get the following
and the only way I get back to the command prompt is by typing quit every time I open terminal and i cant understand why the Vim process is running in the first place.
I was just outside the terminal in a document copy and pasting text then accidentally did a command v to paste within terminal which resulted in this happening.
It appears that you've accidentally updated one of your shell startup scripts so it launches vim.
If your default shell is csh or tcsh, take a look at .cshrc, .tcshrc, and .login in your home directory, and look for a command like vi -e or vim -e.
If your default shell is bash, check .bashrc and .bash_profile.
It may be easier to figure out which file you messed up by checking which file in your home directory was modified most recently:
% ls -altr $HOME | tail
-a lists all files, including files whose names start with ..
-l gives you a long listing, showing timestamps.
-t sorts by modification time.
-r reverses the order, so newer files are shown last
I have to make a script using vim which opens a file, set the fileformat=unix, and then save the file and exit. Could you please help? Thanks
First, check out whether you have a dos2unix or dos2ux command; it already does this for you.
With Vim, this should do the job:
$ vim -c "wq ++ff=unix" filename
This one in-lines the fileformat change with the :w command; of course, you can also do this separately via -c "set ff=unix".
Notes
You can also do this via a variety of tools, e.g. sed, perl, ...; Vim is a quite heavyweight alternative.
This still starts up a full, interactive Vim instance. Have a look at this answer which additional command-line arguments can turn Vim into batch mode.
I'm using tmux with many windows, and I frequently lose track of which files I'm editing in vim. I'd like to have another shell open that runs a script that tells me the paths of files that vim is currently editing.
I'm running Mac OS.
The way I would tackle the problem is to query all remote Vim processes for their opened buffers. You can use Vim's clientserver functionality for that. The GVIM server names are usually sequentially named: GVIM, GVIM1, ...; for terminal Vim, you'd have to name them with the --servername argument (e.g. via a shell alias).
You can then query the list of open files via the --remote-expr argument. A simple expression to loop over all listed buffers (like what the :ls command shows) is:
map(filter(range(1, bufnr('$')), 'buflisted(v:val) && ! empty(bufname(v:val))'), 'bufname(v:val)')
As you can see, it's a bit involved and might affect your workflow of launching Vim. Think hard whether you really need this!
That I know of there is no way to get every open vim buffer from an external process. Instead of using separate tmux layouts and a separate instance of vim to edit multiple files, you could have one instance of vim and edit multiple separate files using :split and :tabnew. Then in that vim instance you can use :ls to see the paths of all open files relative to the current working directory. :pwd also works.
If this isn't your style and you'd still like to use vim in separate layouts, you can use ps to see the arguments to each vim process and check the cwd of these processes. Something like:
paste <(pgrep vim | xargs pwdx) <(pgrep vim | xargs ps -o %a | sed 1d)
Note that if you use multiple buffers in vim the above won't quite work because it will only list the arguments given to each vim command and not list the actual buffers.
You could tweak around with the piped commands ps -eF | grep vim for your script.
At the end of each line, of the result, you'll see you the different processes dealing with anything related to 'vim'. Therefore you'll find which files are currently being edited by vim('vim foo.txt' for instance), as well as 'grep vim' that was being active to get this result. To have a pretty output, you'd have to filter all of these with a script.
I hope this will help you.
is there a way to use vim as a command line tool? What I mean is, use it from the console (without opening a ncurses window) to run vim commands on file and save them. I need this because I usually run through all my files and do 'gg=G' to auto indent them.
Thanks
Here are listed two different ways to do that:
by using vim -s file-containing-commands file-to-edit
by using vim file "+:firstcommand" "+:secondcommand" ...
The first solution needs a file to be written beforehands; the second solution will launch vim and execute the commands, without leaving vim; you'll have to do that yourself, for instance adding a last command '+:x'
I am developing a php application using ViM. Is there a shortcut for me to run the currentEditing.php? Alternatively, is there a shortcut for running main.php?
It depends on your platform, certainly, but when I'm developing python I often run the current script just by executing :!%. The colon for a command (obviously), the bang for shell execute, and the percent for the current filename.
You can execute shell commands in ViM using the following syntax:
:!command -options arguments
Therefore, you need to save your file first, and then run whatever command you need for executing php.
I don't know php, so let me give you an example with compiling a C file:
... editing text
:w main.c # save to file
:!gcc -Wall main.c # compile the code
:!./a.out # execute the executable
Note that :! commands are run by shell and ViM has no understanding of it. Therefore, you can execute any command. This also means that the command cannot run on a modified, unsaved buffer.