More Global Fun

Today I had a friend ask me, "is there a way to load every line matching a pattern into a single register?" This lead me to look into a way to append to a register. I've come to find out that yanking something into a register using a capital rather than lowercase letter appends instead of overwriting the register. From there, it was just a matter of using the global command to invoke a yank on all the matches. Here's the result.

:%g/.*foo.*/normal "Ayy/

Note that `A and `a share the same register. So you can simply put using "ap (as usual). Another neat trick is a quick way to clear a register. Registers often persist among sessions (depending on your Vim setup). You can clear any register a to z as follows.

:let @a=@_

I knew there was a use for the blackhole register ;-).

Piping Buffers

Say you have a buffer in Vim, and you want to run it through an external command. For the sake of example, let's say that command is sort. All you have to do is the following:

:% ! sort

or more generally

:% ! command

If you want to bring the output of a command into buffer you can do:

:r ! ls -l

or even:

:r ! cat filename | sort