I'm using Vim to read man and I'm trying to set up a script in my vimrc that will display NERDTree unless I'm reading from a man page.
I've got the following in vimrc:
" This is needed because $MANPATH wasn't set in my environment
let $MANPATH=substitute(system("manpath"),"\n","","")
if (match(expand("%:p:h"),$MANPATH) == -1)
echo ("manpath is: ".$MANPATH)
echo ("path is: ".expand("%:p:h"))
echo ("match: ".match(expand("%:p:h"),$MANPATH))
" Load NERDTree here
endif
When I run vim normally, it works as expected:
andrey#Andrey-P:~$ vim file.txt
manpath is: /usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man
path is: /home/andrey
match: -1
However, opening a man page returns this:
andrey#Andrey-P:~$ man vim
manpath is: /usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man
path is: /usr/share/man
match: -1
One would expect this to be a fairly straightforward match to make, but it doesn't seem to work. Can anyone help?
It looks like you've got the arguments to match() the wrong way around. The first argument should be the expression to be searched ($MANPATH in your case) and the second argument should be search pattern.
See :help match() for a full description of the function.
Related
I use the :set makeprg functionality to set different make behaviour depending on files. One feature of this is that I can use % and %< in order to refer to the file in the active buffer, as well as $ for environment variables.
I'd like to echo the expanded makeprg variable, but I can't seem to achieve this.
For example, suppose I have :set makeprg=build\ %, and I'm working on file Foo.txt.
I would expect the output of echoing an expanded makeprg to be:
build Foo.txt
However, we have the following result when echoing the &makeprg variable:
:echo(&makeprg)
build\ %
The solution probably involves using expand(), except that this would involve parsing the &makeprg for escaped symbols and dealing with $ appropriately for environment variables. Is there a solution to this that I'm missing?
Why would you need this? For troubleshooting, I would probably just append echo to 'makeprg' (that's a trailing space after \):
:setl makeprg^=echo\
But the following should do what you had in mind. The trick is to split the 'makeprg' string on spaces, and process each word individually:
:echo join(map(split(&makeprg), 'expand(v:val)'))
A bit closer to the truth:
join(map(split(mystring, '\ze[<%#]'), 'expand(v:val)'), '').
So far, I have been manually refactoring code by using the find-and-replace operation
%s:/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g
in vim.
But this is a slow and laborious process if I have stringiwanttoreplace in many files inside a specific directory.
My current/typical slow and laborious process involves a grep:-
grep -rn "stringiwanttoreplace" .
in my terminal to reveal all the locations/filenames where stringiwanttoreplace are; and now that I know which files contain stringiwanttoreplace, I will open each file one-by-one to perform the find-and-replace operation in each file.
Is there a more efficient workflow (in vim) to get this done?
CLARIFICATION: I would prefer a vim-based solution instead of a bash script/one-liner.
Here's the full sequence of commands that I would use:
/stringiwanttoreplace
:vimgrep /<c-r>// **
:Qargs
:argdo %s//newstring/g
:argdo update
In the first line, we search for the target pattern. That populates the last search pattern register (:help quote/), which means that we won't have to type it out in full again.
The :vimgrep command searches the entire project for the specified pattern. Type <c-r>/ as ctlr+r followed by / - this inserts the contents of the last search pattern register onto the command line. The first and last / symbols are delimiters for the search field. The trailing ** tells Vim to look inside every file and directory below the current directory.
At this point, the quickfix list will be populated with search matches from all matching files. :Qargs is a custom command, which populates the argument list with all of the files listed in the quickfix list. Here's the implementation:
command! -nargs=0 -bar Qargs execute 'args ' . QuickfixFilenames()
function! QuickfixFilenames()
" Building a hash ensures we get each buffer only once
let buffer_numbers = {}
for quickfix_item in getqflist()
let buffer_numbers[quickfix_item['bufnr']] = bufname(quickfix_item['bufnr'])
endfor
return join(values(buffer_numbers))
endfunction
Add that to your vimrc file.
Having run :Qargs, our argument list should now contain all of the files that include our target string. So we can run the substitution command with :argdo, to execute the command in each file. We can leave the search field of the substitution command blank, and it will automatically use the most recent search pattern. If you want, you could include the c flag when you run the substitution command, then you'll be prompted for confirmation.
Finally, the :argdo update command saves each file that was changed.
As #Peter Rincker pointed out, you should ensure that Vim's 'hidden' option is enabled, otherwise it will raise an error when you try to switch to another buffer before writing any changes to the active buffer.
Also, note that the last 3 commands can be executed in a single command line, by separating them with a pipe character.
:Qargs | argdo %s//replacement/gc | update
The :Qargs command is pinched from this answer (by me), which in turn was inspired by this answer by DrAl. A very similar solution was posted by #ib, which suggests to me that Vim should really implement something like :quickfixdo natively.
If you really want to do it in Vim you can follow the suggestions here.
You can call this from within Vim (:!find ...) but you don't need to:
find . -type f | xargs sed -i 's/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g'
Fine-tune the file selection with the dozens of parameters described in
man find
(e.g., replace only in HTML files: -name \*.html)
This solution will try to attempt the replacement in all files. You can filter that through grep before, but that is just doing twice the work for no gain.
By the way: sed uses almost the same syntax for regular expressions as Vim (stemming from the same history).
You could open all the files and type
:bufdo :s/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g
It performs the search/replace in all your buffers.
You don't need vim to do this, you can use command line tools. Using sed in a loop on the list of files to do this for you automatically. Something like this:
for each in `grep -l "stringiwanttoreplace" *` ;
do
cat $each | sed -e "s/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g" > $each
; done
vim7 has recursive grep built-in
:vimgrep /pattern/[j][g] file file1 file2 ... fileN
the result will be shown in a quickfix-window (:help quickfix)
to do the search recursively use the **-wildcard like
**/*.c to search through the current folder and recursively through all subdirectories.
I'm looking for an example of how to use the findfile function in a vim script to search upwards recursively for a file, specifically using a wildcard.
Whenever I include a wildcard character as part of the first function parameter this doesn't seem to work.
For example, with the following directory structure:
~/MyProject/
Test.sln
src/
Test.cs
If I run the following function, while editing the file Test.cs with pwd set to ~/MyProject/src
function! Test()
let a = findfile("*.sln", ".;")
echo a
endfunction
findfile appears to return nothing. However, if I modify the function to remove the widcard as follows:
function! Test()
let a = findfile("Test.sln", ".;")
echo a
endfunction
It does what I would expect.
I've tested this on both ubuntu and windows and I see the same behavior on both. Am I doing something wrong here, or does findfile just not support wildcard characters? A lack of support for the wildcard character seems like a fairly strange omission. It seems like I must be doing something wrong here.
If you're using wildcards I think the glob() and/or globpath() functions are what you're looking for. See :h glob() and :h globpath().
One way to do it with external (fast) find
function! Test()
let l:list=system("find .. -maxdepth 1 -name \*.sln")
echo l:list
endfunction
I'm using vim -d file1 file2 in order to see the differences between them. This works fine, but I want to ignore whitespace changes - they are irrelevant for source code files.
Vim help states that the following command will do the magic:
set diffopt+=iwhite
But unfortunately, this command only adds -b to diff tool command line, and that only ignores trailing whitespaces. The correct command line key for diff should be -w, to ignore all whitespace changes. But I can't find how to modify the diff command line directly from Vim. Of course I can compile a custom diff, or replace diff with diff.sh, but that looks kinda ugly :(.
Is there a better way to modify how Vim interacts with the diff tool for displaying file differences?
This implements what you want (taken from the diffexpr docs with -b changed to -w):
set diffopt+=iwhite
set diffexpr=DiffW()
function DiffW()
let opt = ""
if &diffopt =~ "icase"
let opt = opt . "-i "
endif
if &diffopt =~ "iwhite"
let opt = opt . "-w " " swapped vim's -b with -w
endif
silent execute "!diff -a --binary " . opt .
\ v:fname_in . " " . v:fname_new . " > " . v:fname_out
endfunction
... I'm still looking for a better diffexpr helper with respect to handling which lines map to which (GNU diff, even with -w instead of -b, is rather baffled by combining extra whitespace with minor edits like commented lines). Maybe diffchar?
Yes. Set the iwhite option as you did, but additionally, make diffexpr empty.
From the relevant section of the vim docs:
iwhite
Ignore changes in amount of white space. Adds
the "-b" flag to the "diff" command if
'diffexpr' is empty. Check the documentation
of the "diff" command for what this does
exactly. It should ignore adding trailing
white space, but not leading white space.
Note also that you can provide a custom diff command line by setting diffexpr. See the discussion on the vimdiff man page, in particular:
The 'diffexpr' option can be set to use something else than the standard
"diff" program to compare two files and find the differences.
When 'diffexpr' is empty, Vim uses this command to find the differences
between file1 and file2:
diff file1 file2 > outfile
Thanks ire, that helped me. I now only need to have this (simpler than what is proposed by Adam K) in my ~/.vimrc :
set diffopt+=iwhite
set diffexpr=""
And it does it... That is still the most powerfull diff tool I know of, far better than any other.
I know it's an antique question but for others like me who didn't know, this is now available:
:set diffopt+=iwhiteall
Adds the "-w" flag to the "diff" command if 'diffexpr' is empty.
See :h 'diffopt'
For those hitting "Invalid argument" doing set diffopt+=iwhite, try without the + like so:
set diffopt=iwhite
However, a more robust approach would be to set ignore whitespace while preserving existing options. Beware though, that the "Invalid argument" error is likely caused by one of those existing options not being supported. In my case it was the "internal" option therefore I needed to set options in the following order:
set diffopt-=internal
set diffopt+=iwhite
Or add the following to your .vimrc:
if &diff
set diffopt-=internal
set diffopt+=iwhite
endif
Credit to https://www.micahsmith.com/blog/2019/11/fixing-vim-invalid-argument-diffopt-iwhite/
Addressing an issue brought up in the comments of Adam Katz's solution:
Depending on the vim version and setup of the user, a silent command can neglect to redraw the screen after it is issued. I also encountered this problem, which arose whenever I executed :diffo after using the suggested diffexpr. My solution was to change the silent execute command to the following:
silent execute "!diff -a --binary " . opt .
\ v:fname_in . " " . v:fname_new . " > " . v:fname_out | redraw!
This forces a redraw after the command is issued.
I'm using gvim on Windows.
In my _vimrc I've added:
set shell=powershell.exe
set shellcmdflag=-c
set shellpipe=>
set shellredir=>
function! Test()
echo system("dir -name")
endfunction
command! -nargs=0 Test :call Test()
If I execute this function (:Test) I see nonsense characters (non number/letter ASCII characters).
If I use cmd as the shell, it works (without the -name), so the problem seems to be with getting output from powershell into vim.
Interestingly, this works great:
:!dir -name
As does this:
:r !dir -name
UPDATE: confirming behavior mentioned by David
If you execute the set commands mentioned above in the _vimrc, :Test outputs nonsense. However, if you execute them directly in vim instead of in the _vimrc, :Test works as expected.
Also, I've tried using iconv in case it was an encoding problem:
:echo iconv( system("dir -name"), "unicode", &enc )
But this didn't make any difference. I could be using the wrong encoding types though.
Anyone know how to make this work?
It is a bit of a hack, but the following works in Vim 7.2. Notice, I am running Powershell within a CMD session.
if has("win32")
set shell=cmd.exe
set shellcmdflag=/c\ powershell.exe\ -NoLogo\ -NoProfile\ -NonInteractive\ -ExecutionPolicy\ RemoteSigned
set shellpipe=|
set shellredir=>
endif
function! Test()
echo system("dir -name")
endfunction
Tested with the following...
:!dir -name
:call Test()
I ran into a similar problem described by many here.
Specifically, calling
:set shell=powershell
manually from within vim would cause powershell to work fine, but as soon as I added:
set shell=powershell
to my vimrc file I would get the error "Unable to open temp file .... "
The problem is that by default when shell is modified, vim automatically sets shellxquote to " which means that shell commands will look like the following:
powershell -c "cmd > tmpfile"
Where as this command needs to look like this, in order for vim to read the temp file:
powershell -c "cmd" > tmpfile
Setting shellquote to " in my vimrc file and unsetting shellxquote (i.e. setting it to a blank space) seem to fix all my problems:
set shell=powershell
set shellcmdflag=-c
set shellquote=\"
set shellxquote=
I've also tried taking this further and scripting vim a bit using the system() call:
system() with powershell in vim
I suspect that the problem is that Powershell uses the native String encoding for .NET, which is UTF-16 plus a byte-order-mark.
When it's piping objects between commands it's not a problem. It's a total PITA for external programs though.
You can pipe the output through out-file, which does support changing the encoding, but still formats the output for the terminal that it's in by default (arrgh!), so things like "Get-Process" will truncate with ellipses, etc. You can specify the width of the virtual terminal that Out-File uses though.
Not sure how useful this information is, but it does illuminate the problem a bit more.
Try replacing
"dir \*vim\*"
with
" -command { dir \*vim\* }"
EDIT: Try using cmd.exe as the shell and put "powershell.exe" before "-command"
Interesting question - here is something else to add to the confusion. Without making any changes to my .vimrc file, if I then run the following commands in gvim:
:set shell=powershell.exe
:set shellcmdflag=-noprofile
:echo system("dir -name")
It behaves as expected!
If I make the same changes to my .vimrc file, though (the shell and shellcmdflag options), running :echo system("dir -name") returns the nonsense characters!
The initial example code works fine for me when I plop it in vimrc.
So now I'm trying to figure out what in my vimrc is making it function. Possibly:
set encoding=utf8
Edit: Yep, that appears to do it. You probably want to have VIM defaulting to unicode anyway, these days...
None of the answers on this page were working for me until I found this hint from https://github.com/dougireton/mirror_pond/blob/master/vimrc - set shellxquote= [space character] was the missing piece.
if has("win32") || has("gui_win32")
if executable("PowerShell")
" Set PowerShell as the shell for running external ! commands
" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7605917/system-with-powershell-in-vim
set shell=PowerShell
set shellcmdflag=-ExecutionPolicy\ RemoteSigned\ -Command
set shellquote=\"
" shellxquote must be a literal space character.
set shellxquote=
endif
endif
Combining the answers in this and the related thread, add the following to your $profile assuming you installed diffutils from chocolatey:
Remove-Item Alias:diff -force
And add the following to your ~/.vimrc:
if (has('win32') || has('gui_win32')) && executable('pwsh')
set shell=pwsh
set shellcmdflag=\ -ExecutionPolicy\ RemoteSigned\ -NoProfile\ -Nologo\ -NonInteractive\ -Command
endif
make sure shellcmdflag is exactly as shown
All credit for these solutions to their respective contributors, this is merely an aggregation post.
I propose an hackish solution. It doesn't really solve the problem, but it get the job done somehow.
This Vim plugin automate the creation of a temporary script file, powershell call through cmd.exe and paste of the result. It's not as nice as a proper powershell handling by vim, but it works.
Try instead
set shellcmdflag=\ -c
Explanation:
Vim uses tempname() to generate a temp file path that system() reads.
If &shell contains 'sh' and &shellcmdflag starts with '-'
then tempname() generates a temp file path with forward slashes.
Thus, if
set shell=powershell
set shellcmdflag=-c
then Vim will try to read a temp file with forward slashes that
cannot be found.
A remedy is to set instead
set shellcmdflag=\ -c
that is, add a whitespace to &shellcmdflag so that the first character
is no longer '-' and tempname() produces a temp file path with backward
slashes that can be found by system().
I remarked on the vim_dev mailing list ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/vTR05EZyfE0 ) that this deserves better documentation.
actf answer works for me, but because of Powershell built in DIFF (which is different from the Linux one) you must add this line to your Powershell profile to have diff working again in VIM:
Remove-Item Alias:diff -force
I'm running GVim v8.2 (Windows).
Using the fullpath to the executable works for me:
set shell=C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe
I don't use VIM but Powershell's default output is Unicode. Notepad can read unicode, you could use it to see if you are getting the output you expect.