[martanne]

Vim is actually a relatively bad filter (some reasons are mentioned in the caveats section of the article). I explicitly designed my vis editor[1] in such a way that it can be used as an interactive filter. The following works as expected, use :wq to write to stdout:

    printf "foo\nbar\nbaz\n"  | vis - | sort

dvtm uses this mechanism to implement its copy mode.

I also recently integrated sam's structural regular expression based command language into the editor. This might be useful for people who want the power of stream editors but with instant visual feedback.

However keep in mind that this feature is relatively new thus likely still contains some bugs ...

[1] https://github.com/martanne/vis

[exDM69]

Thanks for your efforts with the Vis editor...

You can do this with any other editor using "vipe" from "moreutils" package. It just opens $EDITOR with stdin input (put to a tempfile) and then reads the tempfile and dumps it in stdout.

    printf "foo\nbar\nbaz\n"  | vipe - | sort  # invokes $EDITOR

[martanne]

Yes vipe is indeed useful for editors which do not support it by themselves. Personally I find a solution solely based on pipes without temporary files more elegant.

I should probably let dvtm fall back to vipe if it is installed. Also I will have to check whether there is an easy fix to make vipe+vis work.