Question

The useful command

:r!date

is not so useful in gVim for Windows (not Cygwin’s gVim) because Windows has its own date function which does not do what I want.

So, something like

:r!c:\cygwin\bin\date

would be great. But that’s a lot to type. And considering that I might want to call a few things this way, it would be nice to write a function, which I could pass an argument foo and it would run

:r!c:\cygwin\bin\foo

What’s the best way to do this? It should be:

1. Permanent: stored in .vimrc or some startup file.
2. Executed with as few keystrokes as possible.

Any suggestions for good places to create mappings are appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think, a simpler solution for day-to-day use (especially if you are
interested in only one of the many system-like commands) would be
creating a custom synonym-command:

:command! -nargs=1 -range=% RR <line1>,<line2>read! c:\cygwin\bin\<args>

This tells Vim to create a new command named RR that accepts a range
and one (mandatory) argument. The command just passes arguments to
read! prepending c:\cygwin\bin\ to the argument.

You could even provide a file completion for the files in c:\cygwin\bin\
directory. All you need for that to work is to create completion-list
function like this:

function! RRComplete(A, L, P)
    return system('dir /b /l c:\cygwin\bin')
endfunction

and then specify the name of that function when creating the command:

:command! -nargs=1 -complete=custom,RRComplete -range=% RR <line1>,<line2>read! c:\cygwin\bin\<args>