How to invoke vim editor and pipe output to bash

vipe is a program for editing pipelines:

command1 | vipe | command2

You get an editor with the complete output of command1, and when you exit, the contents are passed on to command2 via the pipe.

In this case, there's no command1. So, you could do:

: | vipe | pandoc -o foo.pdf

Or:

vipe <&- | pandoc -o foo.pdf

vipe picks up on the EDITOR and VISUAL variables, so you can use those to get it to open Vim.

If you've not got it installed, vipe is available in the moreutils package; sudo apt-get install moreutils, or whatever your flavour's equivalent is.

You can do this from within Vim:

:w !pandoc -o file.pdf

Or even write the buffer into a complex pipeline:

:w !grep pattern | somecommand > file.txt

And then you can exit Vim without saving:

:q!

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However, considering your specific use case, there is probably a better solution by using vi as your command line editor. Assuming you use bash:

set -o vi

This sets your keybindings to vi. So you can edit your commands right on the command line with basic vi keybindings by pressing <Esc> and then typing vi commands such as x, cw, etc. (You can get back in insert mode by pressing i.)

Even better, and more relevant to this question, you can open Vim to create your command line content directly. Just type <Esc>v and you will get an empty Vim buffer. When you save and exit, that is the command on your command line and it is immediately run. This is much much more flexible than editing on the command line directly as you can write a whole mini-script if you want.

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So, for example, if you want to write some tricky text and pipe it into pandoc immediately, you could just type:

<Esc>v

Then edit the Vim buffer until you have something like:

cat <<EOF | pandoc -o file.pdf
stuff for pandoc
more stuff for pandoc
EOF

Then save and exit (with :x) and the whole thing will be run as a shell command.

It will also be available in your shell's command history.

Running in a pipeline

Try:

quickedit() (  trap 'rm ~/temp$$' exit; vim ~/temp$$ >/dev/tty; cat ~/temp$$ )

The key is that, to be able to use vim normally, vim needs stdout to be the terminal. We accomplish that here with the redirect >/dev/tty.

For purposes of security, I put the temporary file in the user's home directory. For more on this, see Greg's FAQ Question 062. This eliminates the need to use an obscure file name.

Example:

When vim opens, I type This function succeeded. and save the file. The result on the screen looks like:

$ quickedit | grep succeeded
This function succeeded.

Even though the output of quickedit is redirected to a pipeline, vim still works normally because we have given it direct access to /dev/tty.

Running a program from within vim

As I mentioned in the comments, vim can pipe a file to a command. From within vim, for example, issue the command :w !pandoc -o file.pdf (Note: the space between w and ! is essential).