External Filter Tricks

!{motion}cmd — let any Unix tool transform your text.

Keys: !

Vim's filter command !{motion} sends the text covered by motion as stdin to a shell command, replacing it with stdout. Sort, dedup, format, encode, decode — any tool works.

Vim's filter operator (Normal-mode !) sends a chunk of the buffer through a shell command and replaces it with the result. Combined with Unix tools, you have unlimited transforms.

Sequence	Effect
`!!`sort	Sort current line through `sort` (no-op for one line, but legal)
`!ip`sort	Sort the inner paragraph
`!G`sort	Sort from cursor to end of file
:%!sort	Sort the whole file
:%!sort -u	Sort + dedup
:%!jq .	Pretty-print JSON in place
:%!python -m json.tool	Same, with Python
:%!xmllint --format -	Pretty-print XML
:%!fmt -w 80	Reflow to 80-column lines
:'<,'>!base64	Base64-encode the visual selection

Watch

📺 #0476 Map Y to y$ (not yet published)
📺 #0480 External Filtering (not yet published)

See also: Shell Commands ({key::!})