How to turn this piped bash command into a vim map?

Question

I have a bash command that will align text into a tabular form. If I have input such as this:

A | B | C
Alpha | Beta | Gamma
12 | 34.56 | 78.9

I can run cat test.txt | sed -e 's/|/'$'\001''|/g' | column -t -s $'\001' to get:

A       | B       | C
Alpha   | Beta    | Gamma
12      | 34.56   | 78.9

The \001 is a delimiter I use with column since I want to retain the | in the text.

I can run this command inside vim by first visually selecting lines and then :'<,'>!sed ... with command exactly as above, without the cat.

I want to turn this into a vim map so that I can visually highlight a bunch of rows, or use text objects, and do the same alignment. Unfortunately, the following:

vnoremap <leader>t :'<,'>!sed -e 's/|/'$'\001''|/g' | column -t -s $'\001'

gives me the error E486: Pattern not found: '$'\001''| for the first $'\001'.

How to resolve this?

Answer 1

The main issue that needs fixing here is that the | character is special here, it is used as a separator for Ex commands and is not passed verbatim to your mapping.

In order to fix it, you need to either use <Bar> or \| here.

See :help map-bar for more details.

Additionally, you'll probably want to add a <CR> at the end, to actually execute the command when the mapping is activated.

Finally, you might want to use xnoremap here, since vnoremap affects both Visual and Select mode. (Select mode is not used very often, but mapping Visual mode only is typically the more correct choice here.)

Putting it all together:

xnoremap <leader>t :'<,'>!sed -e 's/<Bar>/'$'\001''<Bar>/g' <Bar> column -t -s $'\001'<CR>

Answer 2

Like @Mass's comment suggested, you can create a columnize.sh file...

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euo pipefail

sed -e 's/|/'$'\001''|/g' | column -t -s $'\001'

(Make it executable of course chmod +x columnize.sh.)

And then in .vimrc map it:

vnoremap <leader>t :!columnize.sh<CR>