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I'm trying to redirect the output of a command to vim using the - argument, but it doesn't seem to work on OS X. For example, if I type

$ ls | vim -

on the command line on one of my Linux machines, the output of ls is correctly piped to vim. But when I do the same thing on any of my OS X machines, I get 

$ ls | vim -
Vim: Reading from stdin...

And it just hangs there until I hit CTRL-D.

Any idea why this would be happening and how to actually redirect the output of a command to vim?

For reference, I'm using OS X 10.6.4 (and 10.6.5) with vim 7.2 (and 7.3) with bash as my shell.

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I would expect a hand like this if their were problems with permissions. This page expands on Vi on OS X more than I ever could. Rather than just cut and paste their answers, I thought I'd point you to it to see if it helps.

http://macvim-dev.github.io/macvim/

It mentions that forking was non-standard and that to fork, one should provide the whole path to binary. Making an alias to the whole path, like vim='TERM=xterm-color vim' would do the trick.

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  • Reading through that whole page, I got to a section where it mentioned that forking was non-standard and that to fork, one should provide the whole path to binary. Doing that, piping a command's output to vim worked fine. So I figured I'd just make an alias for vim that would provide the whole path, and that's when I noticed: sometime, years ago, I had already created an alias for vim: alias vim='export TERM=xterm-color; vim'. I fixed this to alias vim='TERM=xterm-color vim' and now it works just as it should. Thanks for indirectly leading me to the solution :-). – RTBarnard Nov 20 '10 at 6:13
  • Any time I can cluelessly get someone to the right place, well, luck is better than skill... :) – Everett Nov 20 '10 at 6:23
  • The link seems broken. Considering this is the selected answer, and the answer is pretty useless without the link, It really feels like a good idea to include the relevant bits of information in the answer. I'm sorely tempted to include the information from the comments into an answer but that's a pretty massive edit – Journeyman Geek♦ Mar 13 '17 at 0:27
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Use the -f option for macvim. And the -R option to quit without being asked to save.

ls | mvim -Rf -

Another example... svn diff | mvim -Rf -

-f option

-f  or  --nofork    Foreground: Don't fork when starting GUI

-R option

-R          Readonly mode (like "view")
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