Vim Function to Send Highlighted Text to a Git Commit

Question

Problem:

Suppose I have the following text in my vim buffer:

This is a commit msg.

Suppose further I have a git repo located at ~/my_repo.

Goal: Make a vim script so that I can highlight the text above, and have it sent as a git commit message within ~/my_repo. It would look something like

:'<,'>Commit ~/my_repo

It would also have auto-complete on its repo argument.

Attempted Solution:

First, the autocomplete function (AFAIK I think this is OK?):

function! GitLocations()
  return find $HOME -name '.git' -printf '%h\n' "generates a list of all folders which contain a .git dir
endfunction 

Next, the actual git commit function, which is incomplete:

function! CommitTextGitRepo(l1, l2, loc)
  let s:msg = ??? " how do I make this the highlighted text from line l1 to line l2?
  execute '!cd ' . a:loc . '&& git commit --allow-empty -m \"' . s:msg '\"'
endfunction

Assuming I can figure out how to get CommitTextGitRepo() working above, the final thing I would need is this (I think):

command! -nargs=* -complete=custom,GitLocations -range Commit call CommitToGitRepo(<line1>, <line2>, <q-args>)

I'm so close. How do I finish this up? :)

Answer 1

GitLocations won't work as expected, since you'll be calling Vim's :find, not the find command. You might try something like:

return system('find $HOME -name ".git" -printf "%h\n"')

And you could add a -type d to it to skip submodules.

To get visually selected text, you can use getline():

let s:msg = join(getline("'<", "'>"), "\n") . "\n"

However, it will be easier if you took advantage of git commit's ability to read the commit message from standard input. From man git commit:

-F <file>, --file=<file>
   Take the commit message from the given file. Use - to read the
   message from the standard input.

With w !, you can write a set of lines to the standard input of a shell command:

:[range]w[rite] [++opt] !{cmd}
                        Execute {cmd} with [range] lines as standard input
                        (note the space in front of the '!').  {cmd} is
                        executed like with ":!{cmd}", any '!' is replaced with
                        the previous command :!.

You could do something like:

function! CommitToGitRepo(l1, l2, loc) range
    exec a:l1 . ',' . a:l2 'w !cd' shellescape(a:loc) '; git commit --allow-empty -F -'
endfunction

command! -nargs=1 -range -complete=custom,GitLocations Commit call CommitToGitRepo(<line1>, <line2>, <args>)

Sources:

• Call a vimscript function that has a range using local variables, from with in a vimscript function on Stack Overflow