Vi and Vim Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people using the vi and Vim families of text editors. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I want to be able to use some normal commands I tend to use in the day to day as an input for another function, for example 4X, I would like 4X to be expanded to XXXX and then use it in a function as :substitude(s, 'here', <expand result of 4X>, 'g')
It's there an easy way to set this up?
In this specific case, you have repeat(4, 'X').
Otherwise, normal and command mode commands don't return anything. They may echo messages (which we can get with execute()), or they can do any kind of action (compile, move cursor, change focus, open/close buffers/windows, change the buffer...). We can't provide a generic answer to your question as there is none.
What are your specific use cases? repeat(). What else?
:substitute, and it has an eponymous functionsubstitute(); the command can be run with a colon, but does not use left/right parens like a function—it uses a delimiter character to separate pattern/replacement/flags. The function uses parens, and must be:called or appear in an expression position (like after:echoor on the right-hand side of a:let).