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.
Sep 11, 2024
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