shortcuts

shortcuts

A command-line tool meant to be used from vim, but equally useful in any shell piping situation.

You can use this basic idea to write your own "shortcuts" in any language -- as long as it can accept input from stdin and write to stdout. You know -- like everything should. 😎

Like many of my other projects, this is only intended to be suitable for use by the author, and is only on GitHub for my convenience. You are welcome to use it, or change it to make it better for your own needs, but it will probably never cater to a general audience.

usage

shell

shortcuts < old.txt > new.txt

vim

From normal mode:

:%! shortcuts

vim (automatic)

This is not recommended unless you know what you're doing. It will overwrite your buffer in insert mode while you're in the midst of editing. You can lose work.

The vimscript function exists solely to restore the cursor to its previous position; by default the cursor is returned to the top of the file after the buffer is completely rewritten, which tends to interrupt the flow of coding. Otherwise, all this does is automate the call to :%! shortcuts shown above.

With this method, the file extension can be sent as an optional argument, which can enable different behaviour depending on file type.

set updatetime=1000 
" pause in activity in insert mode
autocmd CursorHoldI * :call Shortcuts()
function Shortcuts()
    let pos = getcurpos()
    let ext = expand('%:e')
    let offset = pos[2]
    let args = {"file": expand("%:p"), "line": getline("."), "line_num": pos[1], "col_num": pos[2]}

    execute ":silent %!shortcuts " . ext
    :call cursor(pos[1], pos[2])
endfunction

License

Two-clause BSD licence.