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I known lolcat for a while now, and wondered if it was possible to display the text that it output, inside of Vim correctly.
So i tried:
:%! lolcat
But while it update the buffer, the text doesn't seem to change at all (compared to when i use it on the commandline, like with echo "hello world" | lolcat)
Any reason why this doesn't work in Vim? And maybe any ways to make it work?
One thing is that lolcat knows how to add colors when writing to a terminal, so by default it will only add colors when it knows it's doing that. When you run lolcat from Vim, it's actually writing to a pipe instead. You can force it to add the colors by using lolcat -f (for --force) instead.
But then, what you'll see is that lolcat is actually adding colors by producing output that includes escape sequences that a terminal recognizes as commands to change colors. Vim doesn't really interpret those by default, and will show them literally, these will look like sequences of ^[[37;41m or ^[[0m etc.
In order to have Vim actually interpret these sequences and render those as colors, you can use a plug-in. For example, install plug-in chrisbra/Colorizer and use the command :ColorHighlight after you have the lolcat -f output with the escape sequences in your buffer.
echo "hello world" | lolcat | hd but noticed no difference in the hex code with/without lolcat...I guess the terminal sequences are discarded, which would explain why they don't appear in hd output?
– Nordine Lotfi
Sep 26 '20 at 18:52
lolcat | some other command it will not be connected to a terminal, but to a pipe... Use -f and it should work: echo "hello world" | lolcat -f | hd.
– filbranden♦
Sep 26 '20 at 19:24
