how to use shell script (external command) to select a file to open&edit

Question

I've got a shell script: find... | stuff | xargs vi which works fine from the shell. But if I invoke that from inside Vim like :! find... | stuff | xargs vi it's kinda weird... like maybe I'm seeing different instance of vim that's spawned in a new shell? In that new vim :ls only shows the new buffer and after doing :q (from this mystery vim instance) then :ls shows the previous buffers available.

So do I want to use :e for this? I was reading several posts about :edit and :enew and such, but couldn't figure out how to combine that with this shell pipeline.

---

edit:
vim seems to be struggling with the shell globbing? and is it not able to accept piped commands through this syntax?

:e `find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*' | shuf -n 1`
E79: Cannot expand wildcards
"`find . -type f -not -path '*/.*'" [New DIRECTORY]
E492: Not an editor command: shuf -n 1`
Press ENTER or type command to continue

results in a buffer:

2 %a   "`find . -type f -not -path '*/.*'" line 1

Answer 1

You can use backquotes in an Ex command in Vim to use the output of a shell command as part of the Ex command arguments, similarly to how backquotes work on a Bourne shell.

Note that this seems to only work on Unix versions of Vim, not on Windows.

If you have a pipeline, you need to escape the pipes with a backslash and turn them into \|. The reason for that is that | is the command separator in Ex and Vim will first split the line into multiple Ex commands and then try to parse the backquotes, in which case an unescaped | will produce an unterminated backquoted shell command.

In your case, if your pipeline produces a single filename, you can use:

:e `find ... \| stuff`

If it produces more than one filename, then :e won't be able to take it (it only takes a single file), but in that case you can use :args to open all the files as "argument" files, which makes them work with :n to skip to the next file (exactly the same as passing filenames as arguments in the vi command-line.)

:args `find ... \| stuff`

Answer 2

You can create a new command as such:

:command! -nargs=1 Find arglocal `=system("/usr/bin/find "..<q-args>)`

As the command does not have :h :command-bar attribute, the whole argument is passed to shell and the following works as expected:

:Find ... | stuff

All found files get into the local arglist and you can do as usual :next, :prev etc.

This also works in Windows provided that you have MSYS/bash and all the coretools installed properly.

Answer 3

Since in windows you can't just :e find ... \| stuff , you need something cleverer. And if you don't have cygwin, it is mostly prefered to use wsl.

func! AddFiles(grep)
   redir => tmp
   call RunPS('RunBash "' . a:grep . '"')
   redir END
   for l in split(tmp,'\n')
       if filereadable(l) 
           exec ':e '.l
        endif
    endfor
endfunc
func! RunPS(var)
        exec 'silent! !Import-Module ~\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1;' . a:var
endfunction 

RunBash is a powershell function that looks like this

function RunBash($fil)
{
wsl bash -c "source ~/.bash_profile; $fil" 
}

Sorry for the Blasphemy :)

For example,

    call AddFiles("find . -iname '*.py' | grep -v __init__")