Pipe output of shell command (!) into a new buffer in Vim

Question

How can I pipe the output of a shell command into a new buffer in Vim? The following obviously wouldn't work, but you can see what I'm getting at:

:!echo % | :newtab

Answer 1

You can't pipe the output of a shell command into a command that creates a new buffer, but you can create a new buffer and read the output of a shell command into that buffer with one entry on Vim's command line. A working version of your example would be

:tabnew | r !echo <c-r>=bufname("#")<cr>

Note that the pipe symbol in this case is a separator between Vim ex commands, not the shell's pipe. See also

:help :tabnew
:help :r!
:help :bar

Answer 2

If you really require to store the result in a new buffer, but require info from the old current buffer, then you can either use system():

:let res = system('echo '.expand('%'))
:tabnew
:put=res

or store the current buffer name for later:

:let bn = expand('%')
:tabnew | :r!echo <c-r>=bn<cr>

Answer 3

:tabnew | enew | r ! <your shell cmd>

works for me.

Answer 4

Here's what I do. It's alluded to in comments in the above answers.

:new | r ! <cmd>
:new | r ! <cmd> #   (# is replaced with filename)

Example 1: Find all text files in /tmp

:new | r ! find /tmp -name '*.txt'

Example 2: You're editing file foo.txt and you want to run ls -la foo.txt and get the output in a buffer:

:new | r ! ls -la #

The # is replaced with the filename of the original buffer you're editing. This is particularly useful for ad-hoc source control commands e.g.

:new | r ! hg annotate -un #

:new creates a horizontal split, use :vnew if you want a vertical split instead and :tabnew for a new tab.