In my previous job i wrote an extension for Visual Studio to do exactly that: call a program with the selection, pass the input to its stdin and replace the sel

In my previous job i wrote an extension for Visual Studio to do exactly that: call a program with the selection, pass the input to its stdin and replace the selection with the output. Then i wrote a bunch of Python scripts to do things like recalculating command id's for wxWidgets, generating the registration, header and body parts from event definitions (which i cut/pasted later, but it was much faster than doing that by hand), aligning some declarations to fit with the code style, etc. The extension would also scan a folder inside My Documents and register any executable, python script, bash script and tcl script to a menu in the IDE. Many people in the studio knew Python and some new Bash (i think i was the only one who used Tcl though, i mainly used it to quickly search the filenames for the project and open a file in VS or Vim. I made it to search as i type and since we had a more or less 1-to-1 mapping between objects and files, i could search for object definitions faster than using VS's search functionality - especially when VS was busy building or doing stuff).