I use vim regularily for all my needs. On very rare occasions I need to open binary files via a hex editor look, and for that I start vim on the file and then run it through xxd via the command: %!xxd
My question is, how can I have my command line open a file directly in this manner, if the option exists? something like typing: gvimbin <file> and then it opens in the right manner.
Edit: to be clear, I am looking for a complete solution that allows running vim exec commands on startup.
You can execute commands after Vim startup by passing them via -c:
$ gvim -c '%!xxd' file.bin
This can even be simplified so that when Vim is started in binary mode (-b argument), it'll automatically convert the file. Put the following into your ~/.vimrc:
if &binary
%!xxd
endif
and start with:
$ gvim -b file.bin
Also have a look at the hexman.vim - Simpler Hex viewing and editing plugin; it makes it easier to deal with hexdumps.
Like Felix say:
xxd <file> | vim -
You can put this into script for example vimxxd:
#!/bin/sh
xxd $1 | vim -
and use like: vimxxd file.txt
Related
Say the files in my working directory are src/example.c src/second.c src/third.c include/example.h include/second.h include/third.h.
I want to open vim in a way that automatically opens three tabs (example, second and third), where each tab contains a vertical split screen between a .c and corresponding .h file. Like the following commands would.
:tabnew include/example.h | vs src/example.c
:tabnew include/second.h | vs src/second.c
:tabnew include/third.h | vs src/third.c
Is there a way I can make a special script that will do this when I open vim?
It is safe to assume files will have the same name.
Ideally, this would happen from a shell script rather than modifying my .vimrc, if that is possible.
well if you want to do that, you clearly need a way to execute vim commands from your shell. Lets see if the vim application supplies that, by using the help command which we should ask first for every shell command:
?> vim --help | grep cmd
--cmd <cmd> Execute <cmd> before any config
+<cmd>, -c <cmd> Execute <cmd> after config and first file
So all that is needed is to chain these commands:
vim -c 'tabnew include/example.h' -c 'vs src/example.c' -c 'tabnew include/second.h' -c 'vs src/second.c' -c 'tabnew include/third.h' -c 'vs src/third.c'
as #Enlico pointed out in the comment, you should use edit or e instead of tabnew in the first command, else you will get 4 tabs. But I used your commands so you can see how easily you would have been able to solve this by reading the --help output.
I want to script vim to edit files from the command line. For example I want to do something along the lines of:
vim -<SOME_OPTION> 'Iworld<Esc>bIhello <Esc>:wq helloworld.txt<CR>'
or:
echo 'Iworld<Esc>bIhello <Esc>:wq helloworld.txt<CR>' | vim
and have it save the file helloworld.txt with a body of hello world
Is this possible? I've tried a few different approaches but none seem to do it. I realize I can do things like vim +PluginInstall to run Ex commands from the command line, but I'd love to be able to string together arbitrary motions
This can be achieved with the + flag and the :normal command:
$ vim +"norm Iworld" +"norm Ihello " +"wq helloworld.txt"
I think what you are looking for is vim's -w/W and -s {scriptin} option. Well in your case you should make a scriptfile, and with -s file to let vim execute all your "key presses"
I think vimgolf has used these options too.
I'm trying to craft a command to dump vim's highlighting information to STDOUT. I can write successfully to a file like this:
vim +'redir >outfile' +'hi' +'redir END' +'q'
After this, outfile contains exactly what I want. But I'd rather output to STDOUT to pipe to a command which converts that highlighting info to CSS.
This approach tries to redirect the command to a register, write to the current buffer, then send that output to tee.
vim -E +'redir #a' +'silent! hi' +'redir END' +'put a' +'w !tee' +'q!' > outfile
This is pretty close, but outputs a leading paging message (255 more lines...) and some ANSI escape crap at the end. Setting nomore did not squelch the message for me. I'm looking to send the exact output sent to outfile in the first command to STDOUT.
Vim supports outputting to stderr, which we can redirect to stdout to solve your problem. Careful though, this feature is intended only for debugging purposes, so it has a few edges. Here's a short sketch of how you could do this.
First, we will be running Vim in silent or batch mode, which is enabled with the -e -s flags (:h -s-ex). We disable swap files -n because they will be a bother if we need to kill Vim when it gets stuck.
Instead of passing Ex commands as command line arguments we source a script file with -S. Create a file hi.vim with the following contents:
verbose highlight
:verbose is necessary to make Vim output the :highlight message to stderr. Let's see what we have so far:
$ vim -n -e -s -S hi.vim
Don't run this yet or you'll get stuck in the darkness of a headless Vim!
Add a :quit command and redirect stderr to stdout:
$ vim -n -e -s -S hi.vim +quit 2>&1
Voilà! Now pipe this mess into any file or utility at your heart's desire.
There's a very thorough wiki article on this topic, "Vim as a system interpreter for vimscript".
Finer points: Due to how Vim interacts with the terminal environment it can't write proper unix LF line endings in batch mode output. Instead it writes line endings which look like CRLF line endings.
Consider adding a filter to get rid of those:
$ vim -n -e -s -S hi.vim +quit 2>&1 | tr -d '\r' | my-css-util
This answers the general question of how to "Redirect ex command to STDOUT in vim", but it doesn't necessarily work for your :hi problem, because of this constraint caused by the -e -s flags:
'term' and $TERM are not used.
If you're working with Unix compatible environment, you can always use a special file, e.g.:
ex +"redir>>/dev/stdout | hi | redir END" -scq!
This will print any Vi/Ex command into standard output which you can parse further.
I ran into this by mistake while running your first command. The second time I ran it, it went to stdout. I guess this is because the file already existed. So you can try (sending to something that already exists):
vim +'redir >/dev/null' +'hi' +'redir END' +'q'
I want to be able to read man pages in Vim.
For some reason, it seems that Vim isn't able to read the output of programs through piping. E.g (man ls) | vi doesn't seem to work, bonus points for somebody who can explain why.
To get around this, I've been using the following little script:
tempo = `mktemp`
man $1 > $tempo ; vi $tempo
This script uses temporary files which I guess work fine, but I was wondering if there was a good way to read man pages in Vim without resorting to creating temporary files
Vim includes a man page viewer, :Man, in its runtime files.
Put this line in your vimrc:
runtime! ftplugin/man.vim
Now you can read syntax-highlighted man pages inside Vim by running :Man. For example:
:Man 3 printf
Even better, you can just place your cursor on a word in the buffer and press <Leader>K (\K) to see the man page for that word.
See :h find-manpage for complete usage and installation instructions.
For some reason, it seems that vim isn't able to read the output of programs through piping […]
According to the man-page, you need to specify a file of - to get it to read from standard input; so:
man ls | vi -
If that doesn't work, you might try using process substitution:
vi <(man $1)
which creates a sort of pseudo-file and passes it to vi.
On my system (Mac OS X), I found that the above left control characters in the output. Instead I used:
export MANPAGER="col -b | vim -MR - "
then just e.g.
man vim
The vim options turn off modifying the buffer and make it read-only. This stops vim complaining if you try to exit with ":q" (you can use :q! of course, but you might as well set the options).
This is also handy for general use - I have the following. The -c command names the buffer, just for completeness.
alias vimpager="vim -MR -c 'file [stdin]' -"
Here is what I did: I've made a function in my .bashrc:
vman() { vim <(man $1); }
When I call vman this automatically calls Vim showing the man page. It works great.
Your example code is wrong.
tempo=`mktemp`
man $1 > $tempo; vi $tempo
But you really only need
man $1 | vi -
By default vim reads vimscripts (=vim commands), not input files, from stdin. That is why you cannot directly pipe man output to vim; as others have mentioned you have to use vim - to make vim read from stdin.
However piping vimscripts can be useful too:
vim test.txt <<EOF
:%s/[aiueo]/X/g
:wq! output.txt
EOF
The above will use vim to open test.txt, replace all vowels with X, write the results to output.txt, and quit (ignoring changes to the original file). It uses a here document but you can of course put the vim commands in a file and use vim test.txt < myscript or cat myscript | vim test.txt to achieve the same result.
I suspect the reason they did it this way was that you can open multiple input files but only execute one script. If input was read from stdin by default, you could only read one buffer that way.
I combined others answers, I am using
vman() {
export MANPAGER="col -b" # for FreeBSD/MacOS
# Make it read-only
eval 'man $# | vim -MR +"set filetype=man" -'
unset MANPAGER
}
Usage:
vman ls
You also can press shift-k on your c function to print the man page
I have a better solution, the one that I used, it is like this:
/bin/sh -c "unset PAGER;col -b -x | vim -R -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist' -c 'map q :q<CR>' -c 'map <SPACE> <C-D>' -c 'map b <C-U>' -c 'nmap K :Man <C-R>=expand(\"<cword>\")<CR><CR>' -"
Hope you'll enjoy it.
You can always use info command for info pages and do info {cmd} | vim.
Source.
A lot of good answers, with respect to plugins it's worth to add that vim-man* provides a set of convenience functions to open and read man pages:
Viewing man pages, as per docs.
:Man printf - open printf(1) man page in a split
:Vman 3 putc - open putc(3) man page in a vertical split
:Man pri<Tab> -
command completion for man page names
* Available on GitHub: https://github.com/vim-utils/vim-man.
I would like to delete the second line of a text file. Using vim or ex any kind of text editor form script.
I have came up with these commands but does not work for me.
#!/bin/sh
iconv -f Utf-16le -t utf-8 ~/Desktop/upload.csv -o ~/Desktop/finalutf.csv
vim ':2d|wq' ~/Desktop/finalutf.csv
ex -sc '%s/\r//e|x' ~/Desktop/finalutf.csv
The script .sh is executable. First line of code works, 3rd as well but not the second one. I tried to see the documentation for the vim commands to delete the specific line, and tried it on terminal and it works (:2d)
trying to use it in script seems confusing. I am new to Ubuntu as well as vim and scripts, trying to learn seems hard enough, with so much of complex commands explained leaving far away, for beginners learning vim, in its documentation.
This is the sort of thing that sed is built for.
sed -i 2d ~/Desktop/finalutf.csv
However, if you must use vim you can do
vim -c "2d|wq" ~/Desktop/finalutf.csv
This works for me:
vim -c "2d|wq" infile