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Comments on Continuously read from piped input using Vim

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Continuously read from piped input using Vim

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In Vim, it's possible to tell it to read from stdin instead of a file, by using vim -. This is so that you can pipe the output of one command into Vim, to view/edit it there.

The problem I'm facing is that Vim seems to wait until the pipe is closed before starting up and displaying anything. It sits there saying Vim: Reading from stdin... until the piped command terminates. This can be a very long time, depending on the command!

Is there any way I can get Vim to instead start displaying immediately, and autoread as more data comes from the pipe?

My use case is trying to use Vim as a pager, so that I can have custom syntax highlighting and folding, for Git logs. My current attempts are failing because Vim waits until the entire log has been loaded before displaying anything at all.

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2 comment threads

Limit the log? (1 comment)
I don't think it's possible, but if it is, less.vim might do it (1 comment)
I don't think it's possible, but if it is, less.vim might do it
celtschk‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Actually given that vim is an editor, I doubt it is possible at all. To allow this, the developers would have to define what it means to edit a file while you're still reading it, and that seems to me something that isn't worth the effort.

However there is a tool called less.vim for using vim as pager. Therefore if it is possible at all to do what you want, I'd guess that script has it. Note that I never used that, so I can't tell you anything more than what's on the linked page.