(pedantic note: When you run shell commands in vim, they are running in an actual shell.) vim can be thought of as a visual and interactive helper for your tex

(pedantic note: When you run shell commands in vim, they are running in an actual shell.) vim can be thought of as a visual and interactive helper for your text-processing utilities. The "intended scope" of vim is text editing, and while you're editing you may want to run commands on the text in your buffer, or just parts of it, and have the results apply immediately without writing and reloading the file, or exiting. For example, in vim, you may be writing a list somewhere in your document, and you realize you want it sorted alphabetically. You can visually select the range of lines ('<,'>) that comprise the list and then sort them by calling the sort utility [1]: :'<,'>!sort And then you can continue adding to the list. What would your workflow be for the above? Some like this...? 1. write the file you are working on in your EDITOR 2. make a mental note of the absolute line numbers for the list in the document 3. open new terminal 4. call an awk command that uses `sort`, or some other script, passing in your line numbers, and the file name 5. switch back to EDITOR and reload file ---- [1] Of course vim has its own `sort` command, so you can leave out the '!' in that example to do the same. vi did not have its own `sort`, so people used the external `sort`. vi also didn't have the visual selection, so people could pick lines using ranges: :.,+10!sort i.e. sort from the current line to the line 10 lines down, inclusive