Even though vi has buffers they inevitably fail you. If you aren’t in
vi you cannot use them. In vim the buffers persist across sessions,
but only if you close out a session and start a new one. If you have
several vi sessions, one to a TMUX pane/window, you will see that this
can get in the way.
The solution that most of the world (that doesn’t understand the UNIX
philosophy) will suggest is to only use one editing session. But you and
I both know that’s just stupid. The entire point of vi is to be able
to quickly open and edit a file anywhere, anytime, not force you into
having to navigate to the file from within a vi session (which is the
asinine motivation for people putting fuzzy-finder shit into their text
editor when just the UNIX command line would have been way better). This
solution is no solution at all.
There’s another problem with this “solution”. If you don’t have your
.viminfo configuration exactly correct it will often truncate your
buffer cut removing all the lines and only preserving a fraction of
them. I’ve done this. It’s disastrous.
The right way to do this is to keep with the UNIX philosophy and put
everything in a file, no buffers at all. The file is the buffer. I use
!ip tee /tmp/foo or !ip w! /tmp/foo or something like it. You can
just :r /tmp/foo from the same file/session or another one without
ever having a problem. I sometimes prefer tee because it doesn’t whine
about overwriting files like w does by default everywhere.
You can easily create a helper filter command to save on a lot of typing while still not violating the UNIX philosophy or requiring any special plugins.
In a file called yyy in the PATH:
#!/bin/bash
> /tmp/buf
while IFS= read -r line;do
echo "$line" >> /tmp/buf
echo "$line"
done
If you want a delete use ddd:
#!/bin/bash
> /tmp/buf
while IFS= read -r line;do
echo "$line" >> /tmp/buf
done
And in a file called ppp:
#!/bin/bash
exec cat /tmp/buf
Yes, those weird file names. If that bothers you use something else. I
like them because they are similar to what I would use from within vi.
You can get a crazy as you want with this. The important thing is that would you are using can be used anywhere, not just within your editor. So you can combine this with your regular use of the UNIX command line, in the true UNIX way:
tail somefile | yyy
Then from within vi just use the normal !!ppp or just :r /tmp/buf.
#vim #tips #unix #linux