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Stephen Ball
Stephen Ball

Posted on • Originally published at rakeroutes.com on

Add vim to a pipeline with vipe

Have you ever wanted to stop and edit text in the middle of a pipeline? With vipe you can!

Take the output of brew search as an example.

$ brew search proxy ==> Formulae aws-es-proxy metaproxy proxytunnel dnscrypt-proxy mitmproxy sproxy haproxy oauth2_proxy tinyproxy ios-webkit-debug-proxy ocproxy twemproxy libproxy proxychains-ng ==> Casks proxyman
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What we if want to call brew info to get more details for those formulae?

Even if we pipe the output to something (e.g. cat) we still have the Formulae and Casks headers:

$ brew search proxy | cat ==> Formulae aws-es-proxy dnscrypt-proxy haproxy ios-webkit-debug-proxy libproxy metaproxy mitmproxy oauth2_proxy ocproxy proxychains-ng proxytunnel sproxy tinyproxy twemproxy ==> Casks proxyman
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We could write some intermediate steps to remove the lines we don’t want. But wouldn’t it be great to have our pipeline stop, let us edit the stream, and then continue?

$ brew search proxy | magic | while read formula; do brew info $formula; done
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It turns out that vipe can be that magic! It will stop and give you a vim session with the output of the preceeding pipe. When you write/quit the vim session that output will be sent down to the subsequent commands in the pipe. Awesome!

Installing vipe

You can get vipe on OSX as part of the moreutils brew formula.

$ brew install moreutils
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Usage

Then drop it in wherever you want to quickly edit text in the middle of the pipeline. It’s also great as a nice way to view intermediate output of a pipeline.

$ brew search proxy | vipe | while read formula; do brew info "$formula"; done
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When we run that command the brew search proxy output goes straight into a vim buffer.

 1 ==> Formulae 2 aws-es-proxy 3 dnscrypt-proxy 4 haproxy 5 ios-webkit-debug-proxy 6 libproxy 7 metaproxy 8 mitmproxy 9 oauth2_proxy 10 ocproxy 11 proxychains-ng 12 proxytunnel 13 sproxy 14 tinyproxy 15 twemproxy 16 17 ==> Casks 18 proxyman
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vim editing goodness We can manipulate that buffer to be whatever we want.

1 mitmproxy
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How about we trim down to one interesting formula? When we save and quit the pipeline continues into the while read loop that sends all the input to brew info.

"/private/var/folders/n6/gxxgmjhs1599x195xzdbnp_40000gn/T/mL0nDL6bCD" 1L, 10C written mitmproxy: stable 4.0.4 (bottled), HEAD Intercept, modify, replay, save HTTP/S traffic https://mitmproxy.org Not installed From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/mitmproxy.rb ==> Dependencies Required: openssl@1.1 ✔, protobuf ✘, python ✘ ==> Options --HEAD Install HEAD version ==> Analytics install: 6,017 (30 days), 15,281 (90 days), 46,094 (365 days) install_on_request: 5,777 (30 days), 14,445 (90 days), 44,138 (365 days) build_error: 0 (30 days)
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Nice!

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