Run external commands

vim integrates very well with your favorite shell commands. Here are some examples.

Just running a command

Not immensely useful, but good to know.

:!command

Run command and insert output into file

Sometimes useful, e.g. to get a file listing into your current file so you can work with the file names.

:r !ls a.*

Filter lines of file

This is very powerful. Shell commands are good at working with text through stdin/stdout, you’re working with text. It’s a a perfect match.

Visual selection

Range

Write lines to a command

Rarely super useful, but it I find occasional uses. E.g. if you have a pastebin script that reads from stdin you could do

:w !pastebin