Use vim as command line tool?

Question

is there a way to use vim as a command line tool? What I mean is, use it from the console (without opening a ncurses window) to run vim commands on file and save them. I need this because I usually run through all my files and do 'gg=G' to auto indent them.

Thanks

I suspect the answer to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3218528/indenting-in-vim-with-all-the-files-in-folder may help you. — Colin 't Hart, Apr 29 '13 at 12:53
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9366243/execute-a-command-within-vim-from-the-command-line. — Jim Stewart, Apr 29 '13 at 12:56
`:bufdo` may help -- if have a bunch of files opened in a vim session — Jan, Apr 29 '13 at 13:28

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

2

Here are listed two different ways to do that:

by using vim -s file-containing-commands file-to-edit
by using vim file "+:firstcommand" "+:secondcommand" ...

The first solution needs a file to be written beforehands; the second solution will launch vim and execute the commands, without leaving vim; you'll have to do that yourself, for instance adding a last command '+:x'

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Community

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answered Apr 29 '13 at 12:56

giorgian

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That's good for regular commands, but I needed to run gg=G on everything! This was my solution using your suggestion `vim file.c '+execute "normal gg=G"' +wq`. This is going straight to my bin folder ;). – Guido Apr 29 '13 at 20:50

Use vim as command line tool?

1 Answers1