[rmilk]

The technique I found works well is to edit the file in vim and use the !G (process lines 1-N in shell) (or use emacs in a similar way). Gives you infinite undo and redo until you get the commands right. Then you can view the history and make a shell script like this using sponge. For example, edit a file, go to line 1 and type: !Gsort File is run though sort and results replace the buffer. To undo, use ‘u’, to redo, use CTRL-r.

[feanaro]

Huh, never heard of `!G`. How is it different from `%!sort`?

[nerdponx]

! is also a normal mode command/operator. It accepts a motion and then drops you into the command line with :{range}! pre-filled, where {range} is the range of lines covered by the motion. !G in normal mode is exactly equivalent to :.,$!

[feanaro]

Oh, wow! That's so neat. Thank you for explaining. It's curious that I missed this for so long.

[nerdponx]

It's OK, I've been a "serious" Vim user for ~7 years and I just learned about it this year. It's such an enormous program with so much functionality that is hard to fault somebody for missing any individual piece of it.

What I find weird is that there's no analogous normal mode operator command for dropping into a command line without the ! prefix. It's easy enough to write your own (good excuse to learn about "operator pending mode"), but I often find myself scratching my head at what made it into the builtin commands and what did not.