Question

I’m planning to send emails from inside of VIM via SendEmail, but I have run into some problems.

1. When piping part of the buffer (or the whole buffer) into SendEmail via the bang (!) operator, the text in my buffer gets replaced with SendEmail’s output. So my first question is: how do I pipe a range into an external command and discard it’s output (or even better: show it in a cmd window)?

2. Most of the options I’m giving to SendMail don’t change most of the time (like the email server or the from-address), so I don’t want to type them every time I send something: I would like a command that has these parameters hard-coded and where I can specify any number of additional parameters (like -u “subject”).

Can this be done via the command feature (nargs,range), or do I need to write a function?

Answer 1

The simplest option for this would be to download the RunView plugin from the Vim website and use this. If you let g:runview_filtcmd be equal to your SendEmail command line, it will take the contents of the current buffer, pipe it to SendEmail and print the output in a separate window. I think this achieves what you need. If you want to use RunView for other stuff, you could omit the g:runview_filtcmd step and just add this command:

:command! -nargs=* -range=% SendEmail <line1>,<line2>RunView SendEmail -e oneoption -b twooption <args>

and then do:

:SendEmail -u "subject"

or

:'<,'>SendEmail -u "subject"

I haven’t tested any of this, but it should work very easily.

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If you want to do it manually, you’ll probably have to write a function. The way that RunView works is to copy the whole buffer into a register, create a new window, paste the buffer into the end of that window and then filter the new lines through the program. It adds a date/time stamp at the start to separate multiple runs of the same program. This wouldn’t be too hard to replicate, but you would probably need a function.

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Edit in response to comment:

If you want to send the path as an argument to SendEmail, you could do something like this (I haven’t tested this, so it might need tweaking a litle):

command! -nargs=* SendEmailAsAttachment exe '!SendEmail -e oneoption -b twooption -f' expand('%:p') <args>

Note that :exe concatenates arguments with a space, so calling SendEmailAsAttachment -u "subject" expands to:

!SendEmail -e oneoption -b twooption -f /path/to/filename.txt -u "subject"

See:

:help expand()
:help :exe