External Commands

vimrc can work with external commands in a very elegant way. You can call the commands in various means. These are the current best practices.

Use the Bang (!)

For simple and easy 1-5 words command, you can easily use the bang. Before the bang, please use the colon to indicate that it is a vim command. Otherwise, it is very confusing between vim commands and shell commands. Here is an example:

:!clear

Use System()

For long and complicated (e.g. variable substitution) commands, you use system(). You can capture the output and error code easily as well. If you need to print the output, you can use a simple echo. Here is an example:

let cmd = 'echo "Hello "' .  vimVariable

let output = system(cmd)

echo output

NOTE:

• As a good practice, formulate the string command in a separate line before feeding it into the system() call.
• Sometimes, when the external command output is too long to the point it requires you to press ENTER a couple of times, you can press q to exit the prompt and get back to editor.

That's all about interacting with external commands from vimrc.