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  • Vim tips: Working with external commands

     

      By Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier on October 25, 2006 (8:00:00 AM)

     

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      Vim is a powerful editing tool, but there are some things it just can't do. However, Vim lets you access shell commands and utilities without leaving Vim, and that lets you perform some amazing tricks.

     

     

    If you run :shell or just :sh while you're in the editor, Vim (or Gvim, if you're partial to Vim's GUI) will place you in an interactive shell. You can run whatever commands you want, and resume your Vim session by exiting the shell.

      

    As most other *nix applications, you can also pause Vim with Ctrl-z, which will drop you back to the shell. When you're finished, you can resume Vim with fg. (This is a feature of the shell, not a Vim feature.)

      

    Have you ever started editing a file, made a bunch of changes, and then typed :w to write your changes, only to find that the file is read-only? You can deal with that in a couple of ways, but one of the easiest things to do is to invoke a shell from within Vim and change the file's permissions before you save it again.

      

    Bang!

      

    Vim also allows you to execute a command directly from the editor, without needing to drop to a shell, by using bang (!) followed by the command to be run. For instance, if you're editing a file in Vim and want to find out how many words are in the file, run

      

    :! wc %
• 13 Oct 07
  

  Ye Liu

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