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Creating Text Processing Tools with Vim

2022-12-03

First, create a Vim script. For example, a script to automatically wrap text at the 70th column is as follows:

:set tw=70
gggqG
:wq

Save it as ~/.vim/scripts/wrap, then you can process a file:

vim -s ~/.vim/scripts/wrap input.txt

If you want to use stdin as input and stdout as output, enabling it to be piped and called by other programs, you can wrap it in a Bash script:

#!/bin/bash

BUF=/tmp/$(head -c 15 /dev/urandom | base32)
cat > $BUF
/usr/bin/vim -s ~/.vim/scripts/wrap $BUF 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
cat $BUF
rm $BUF

Thus, a small tool is completed.

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