When you're typing some text in Vim, you will sometimes need a piece of text that is easy to generate on the command line or with a simple perl script. Maybe you want to insert the current date, a simple calendar or a list of day names.
Don't you worry there's a simple vim command that will help you with this. Here are some examples. From simple to complex.
Insert the current date
on a line by itself. Then move the cursor to that line and type
This will filter
date through the shell (which is equivalent to
The current date will be replaced into the buffer. If the output isn't correct
or different from what you expected, then you can always use
u to undo the
Insert a simple calendar
And type the same command as before
!!sh<cr>. The nice thing about using
!! command this way, is that you can create a command line in Vim.
SQL queries collecting output
Sometimes it's easier to use the command line when conversing with you're MySQL database instead of using phpmyadmin. This will happen when you need to create queries based on output of other queries. An example:
SELECT `id` FROM `entry` WHERE `post_date` BETWEEN '2006-10-25' AND '2005-11-05'
This query of a fictitious database will get the id's of the entries in a datarange. This query can be piped into mysql by using the following command:
mysql -u dbuser -pdbpass databasename
As always prefix the command with
!!mysql .... This will send the query to
the database. The output of the query will be replaced into the current
buffer one id on each line.
After this you can use the output together with vim to creates new queries. Assume we got the following output:
10 11 12 13
These are the id's we got. We can translate the id into new queries by using some Vim commands.
UPDATE `entry` SET `visible` = 1 WHERE `id` = 10 UPDATE `entry` SET `visible` = 1 WHERE `id` = 11 UPDATE `entry` SET `visible` = 1 WHERE `id` = 12 UPDATE `entry` SET `visible` = 1 WHERE `id` = 13
Now selected these queries by using
V visual line mode. When you press
now, vim will ask for a program to start, just like in the other examples. When
mysql, vim will send each query to the database.
To print all the letters of the alphabet you can use the keyboard and type all the letters one after another. If you are a bit more lazy and want to learn some nice vim command and perl code, you can use the next command.
print 'a' .. 'z';
This is a line of perl code that will print all the letters of the alphabet
when executed. This line of code can be executed by typing
!!perl<cr> on the
line of code. The code will expand into