How to combine two Vim commands into one (command not keybinding)

Question

I've found few Stack Overflow questions talking about this, but they are all regarding only the :nmap or :noremap commands. I want a command, not just a keybinding. Is there any way to accomplish this?

Use-case:

When I run :make, I doesn't saves automatically. So I'd like to combine :make and :w. I'd like to create a command :Compile/:C or :Wmake to achieve this.

Possible duplicate of [VIM - multiple commands on same line](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3249275/vim-multiple-commands-on-same-line) — Doktor OSwaldo, Oct 09 '18 at 14:53

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 08 '18 at 14:02

The general information about concatenating Ex command via | can be found at :help cmdline-lines.

You can apply this for interactive commands, in mappings, and in custom commands as well.

Note that you only need to use the special <bar> in mappings (to avoid to prematurely conclude the mapping definition and execute the remainder immediately, a frequent beginner's mistake: :nnoremap <F1> :write | echo "This causes an error during Vim startup!"<CR>). For custom commands, you can just write |, but keep in mind which commands see this as their argument themselves.

:help line-continuation will help with overly long command definitions. Moving multiple commands into a separate :help :function can help, too (but note that this subtly changes the error handling).

arguments

If you want to pass custom command-line arguments, you can add -nargs=* to your :command definition and then specify the insertion point on the right-hand side via <args>. For example, to allow commands to your :write command, you could use

:command -nargs=* C w <args> | silent make | redraw!

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 08 '18 at 16:40

You can combine commands with |, see help for :bar:

command! C update | silent make | redraw!

However, there is a cleaner way to achieve what you want. Just enable the 'autowrite' option to automatically write modified files before a :make:

                                 'autowrite' 'aw' 'noautowrite' 'noaw'
'autowrite' 'aw'        boolean (default off)
                        global
        Write the contents of the file, if it has been modified, on each
        :next, :rewind, :last, :first, :previous, :stop, :suspend, :tag, :!,
        :make, CTRL-] and CTRL-^ command; and when a :buffer, CTRL-O, CTRL-I,
        '{A-Z0-9}, or `{A-Z0-9} command takes one to another file.
        Note that for some commands the 'autowrite' option is not used, see
        'autowriteall' for that.

This option is mentioned in the help for :make.

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

I have found a solution after a bit of trial and error.

Solution for my usecase

command C w <bar> silent make <bar> redraw!

This is for compiling using make and it prints output only if there is nonzero output.

General solution

command COMMAND_NAME COMMAND_TO_RUN

Where COMMAND_TO_RUN can be constructed using more than one command using the following construct.

COMMAND_1_THAN_2 = COMMAND_1 <bar> COMMAND_2

You can use this multiple times and It is very similar to pipes in shell.

How to combine two Vim commands into one (command not keybinding)

3 Answers3

arguments

Solution for my usecase

General solution