How to Transform a (part of) Buffer in Vim with an External Program

The aim of this page📝 is to explain transformation of buffer/its part within Vim by running it via another Unix program.

Pavol Kutaj

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Sep 11, 2024

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Example#1: Deduplication

• Use :%!sort | uniq to sort and remove duplicates.
• % represents the entire file in Vim.
• :%! runs an external command on the entire file.
• Useful for applying changes globally without specifying line numbers.
• sort sorts the lines alphabetically.
• uniq removes consecutive duplicate lines.

Example#2: Base64 encode decode

• Visually select a string to encode (Shift-V for line is enough)
• press : to enter command-line
• enter ‘<,’>!base64 → the range is encoded !
• the range is replaced with base64 representation of the selection