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Comment by blockloop | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know about :r in combination with !. That's neat. I typically use :r for reading a file into the current buffer (instead of cp <file> <new>). Thanks for sharing.

I don't find myself using ! commands when I know there are multiple commands that I need to run (like your last example). That's usually when I'll suspend and then use the command line.

Could you elaborate on "wreak havoc on your vim session?" I wasn't aware that suspending the process and bringing it back into the fg would harm anything.

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> I didn't know about :r in combination with !

You can even use :w in combination with !. For example

    :w !xclip

to write the vim buffer contents to the clipboard. You could visually highlight part of the buffer and do the same thing for just the text you want.

This is also useful for iterating on a throw-away script - something too long to type on one line in the shell, but not significant enough to be worth saving to a file. Put it together in an unnamed buffer, and ":w !" it to the relevant interpreter (eg ":w !perl") whenever you want to run it.

for osx peeps: `:w !pbcopy`

Though I understand that this is just an example of the power of `!r`, readers should know that VIM in fact can copy to the system clipboards natively.

    "*y
    "+y

Only if it's compiled with clipboard support. I don't know about in other places, but in the default Arch package it's not. So this command is a perfect solution for me.

You need to install `gvim` which provides `vim` with that feature.

That requires that vim be compiled with the xterm-clipboard feature enabled. On my Fedora 24 desktop, vim doesn't have it enabled, but gvim does (according to the output of the :version command).

One advantage of the method you describe is that it can be limited to just part of a line. Piping output to xclip is limited to complete lines of text due to the nature of :w !.

> That's usually when I'll suspend and then use the command line.

That's when I run !bash, enter my list of commands, then exit.

If one wants something that isn't limited to one shell, and invokes the interactive shell that the user has chosen, there is of course

    :shell

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