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- [Instructor] Vim can run external commands

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and capture their output.

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I'll be showing you commands that work

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mostly on Mac or Linux.

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To follow along on Windows you should install

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packages such as msys32 or Cygwin.

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We'll open Vim.

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I usually work in full screen mode to reduce distractions.

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To quickly see what the time is,

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I can use the date utility.

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So colon exclamation mark for running

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an external command and date.

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And I can see now that it's 10:57 in the morning.

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Say you would like to prepare an index file

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with a list of all the files.

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You can tell Vim to read the output of the command.

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In this case it will be ls or on Windows dir.

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So let's start.

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Edit, index.txt

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and then I for insert mode and list of files.

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And now escape to get back to normal mode.

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And now we do :r for read.

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But this time instead of reading from a file,

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we'll read from a command.

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So read :ls.

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And enter.

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And we have the list of files.

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Lets say vid:w then enter.

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Another option is to run a tool on the current file.

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For example when working with JSON

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sometimes you get everything in one line.

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E tebeka.json.

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This is the output from GitHub's rest api.

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It's hard to read.

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Let's use the jq utility

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which is a utility for working with JSON files.

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And you will need to install it first.

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So :current file, run it through the command

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jq. and enter.

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And now everything is indented and much easier to read.

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Once you're done looking you can use u to undo the changes.

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This is very handy.

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You can use the tidy utility for xml files.

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And Vim comes with the utility code xxd which will

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let you edit binary files inside Vim.

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There are many useful external commands

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on the Mac Linux system.

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Get to know them and Vim will be even more powerful.