How to execute commands in vim, piping the output back into the editor in real time?

Question

So, to begin, this is similar to Pipe shell command into buffer in real-time.

The difference is that the top answer there pipes the output to a new buffer. How do I pipe the output to the editor itself in real time?

For example, I have this open in my vim (with line numbers on for illustration):

1 for num in "a" "b" "c"; do echo "${num}"; sleep 1; done
2
3
4

What I want is to be able to run a command that execute that line (something like yyp!!bash), and get these in the editor in the interval of 1 second:

1 for num in "a" "b" "c"; do echo "${num}"; sleep 1; done
2 a
3
4

then

1 for num in "a" "b" "c"; do echo "${num}"; sleep 1; done
2 a
3 b
4

then

1 for num in "a" "b" "c"; do echo "${num}"; sleep 1; done
2 a
3 b
4 c

Is this possible to do in vim?

Currently yyp!!bash will print the output only after the whole command is finished (i.e., only gets the output after three seconds).

Update

If that's not possible (as hinted in the comments), alternatively I would be interested in an editable terminal, essentially being able to edit the output (and the input) of :term.

Answer 1

You've clarified in the comments that your need would be satisfied if you could edit the output buffer and current command prompt when in a :terminal buffer.

You can achieve the latter by using your shell's "edit in an editor" function. In bash, this is called edit-and-execute-command and is usually bound to Ctrl-XCtrl-E (make sure your EDITOR variable is set). Other shells have similar features, although I haven't tested these.

Amazingly, this even works inside a :terminal buffer, spawning a new instance of Vim inside Vim.

Unfortunately, unless I'm misreading :help terminal.txt, it's not possible to edit the contents of a Vim terminal window.

Before looking into rolling your own solution, you might like to look into the Conque plugin. Whilst development on it has ceased, it's always worked well for me. To use it to run a bash shell you run the command:

:ConqueTerm bash

The new shell starts in insert mode. You can escape to normal mode by pressing Esc as usual, after which you can edit any output using regular Vim commands.

Entering insert mode while on the command line will return you to typing into the prompt, but you can still use edit-and-execute-command to edit the current command as I described above. The one proviso is that when you are in the Vim-inside-a-Vim in Conque, pressing Esc will exit insert mode of the outer instance of Vim. The easiest way to exit insert mode in the inner Vim is to press Ctrl-C instead, but setting up a mapping would also work.

All the above applies to Vim. I don't know what the situation is like in Neovim, which has it's own similar-but-different implementation of a terminal window.

Answer 2

Well looking at your comments... Try to reuse built in :terminal either by manually copy-pasting to it or using plugin https://github.com/habamax/vim-sendtoterm

It might look like:

Answer 3

Nor in realtime, but you could do::

:0r !<c-r><c-l><cr>

The :0r means read into vim line 0. The exclamation mark says execute the following in the shell. Assuming your cursor is on the command to be executed <c-r><c-l> means fetches the current line into the command I am typing, then the final <cr> just means hits enter.

The result won't be read until all the sleeps/outputs have been completed.