Question

I have a bash script which takes a single argument and returns around 8-10 lines of text.

I’d like to be able to call this script from within vim. Ideally by highlighting a string of characters as the argument. I’d then like the output of the script to be displayed in a new pane.

I’m new to vim so I’m not sure if this can be done simply by creating a command in my vimrc file or if I need to create a plugin.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

after a bit of googling I’ve come up with

function! Foo(a1)
    new
    r !myscript a:a1
endfunction

This doesn’t quite work yet. It seems to pass the name a:a1 rather than the value.

Answer 1

I’d start with a simple function like so (note: the sample uses echo as the script… Kinda lame… but you get the idea)

function! CallMyScript(params)
    new                 " open a new buffer
    " se buftype=nofile " add spice to taste, e.g.
    silent! exec "r!echo '" . a:params . "'"
endfunction

and then a mapping for visual mode like;

:vnoremap QQ y:call CallMyScript(@")<Enter>

This will call the script with the currently selected text when you hit QQ