Extending Vim really is a pain if you're trying to stay within Vim. Your best bet is to rely on piping output to other shell utilities to get the desired behavi

Extending Vim really is a pain if you're trying to stay within Vim. Your best bet is to rely on piping output to other shell utilities to get the desired behavior. :r!cmd reads output of given command into current file. After selecting a set of lines with "V" you can pipe them through a shell command like so: :'<,'>!cmd I've also found that you can accomplish a lot with a hastily recorded Vim macro. To start recording keystrokes into buffer "a": qa When you're done, hit "q" again and you're macro is saved. "@a" to execute macro. Vim commands string together pretty easily, and I've done some serious refactoring on good ol' C and ASM with this method back in the day. These days I'm writing Java in Eclipse, which just doesn't have the same feeling to it.