[foota]

I didn't realize vim supported reading from standard in, thanks!

[dllthomas]

You can go one further. I have an alias 'cbuf=vim - -ccbuf!'

This takes whatever is piped in and loads it into the quickfix list. So I get locations out of anything with lines of the format "file:line: something" or "file:line:col: something".

Eg: git grep -n | cbuf