Question

I’m trying NERDtree which is pretty cool, but what I’d like to do is execute special commands, or scripts, on the selected file.

For example, I’d like to highlight an image file in the tree, hit some key and have the appropriate XHTML tag inserted in the original file (I have a small script to do the formatting, I just need to run it on the file). Or insert a ‘require modulename’ when hitting another key while modulename is selected. Or, well I guess you got the point.

Can it be done in NERDtree, or is there any other plugin that allows this?

Thanks

EDIT
I thought of this solution: I run the command on the file under the cursor in the browser window, capture its output in a register, switch back to the previous window and paste the content of the register.

The problem with this approach is that the file in the browser window has no reference to its full path, so it’s just a filename and thus basically useless unless you just work with stuff in the cwd.

Answer 1

After research I found a solution that seems to do exactly what I wanted. This piece of code shoud be inserted in a file under ~/.vim/nerdtree_plugin (or equivalent directory under other operating systems):

call NERDTreeAddKeyMap({
    \ 'key': 'b',
    \ 'callback': 'NERDTreeInsertImage',
    \ 'quickhelpText': 'Insert XHTML tag of image' })

function! NERDTreeInsertImage()
    let n = g:NERDTreeFileNode.GetSelected()
    if n != {}
        let @i = system("~/perl/image.pl " . n.path.str())
        normal ^Wp"ip
    endif
endfunction

it adds a mapping to key b which runs the function NERDTreeInsertImage() which takes the full path of the selected file in the browser and passes it as an argument to my perl script. Of course ^W is inserted as <C-V><C-W>.

Hope this can be helpful to some other Vim user 🙂

@romainl this is the very simple Perl script (requires ImageMagick module):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Image::Magick;

my $source = $ARGV[0];

my $img = Image::Magick->new;

$img->Read($source);

my ( $width, $height ) = $img->Get('width', 'height');
print qq#<img src="$source" width="$width" height="$height" alt="">#;