One can also use Vim to edit clipboard text. I've experimented with a few ways. Here's a published example of how it could be done (from someone else). Adding a keyboard shortcut makes it faster when you're not already in a terminal. You can edit (e.g.) web text boxes with Vim this way, although active JavaScript doesn't always react to a paste the same way as typing. Depends on the page.
Here's a pattern I find pretty useful:
For example:
Converting spaces to tabs, for pasting into a spreadsheet program:
pbpaste | tr ' ' '\t' | pbcopyConverting tabs and newlines to html table formatting:
pbpaste | sed 's/^/<tr><td>/' | sed 's/\t/<td>/g' | pbcopyEscape angle brackets and ampersands for html:
pbpaste | sed 's/&/\&/g; s/</\</g; s/>/\>/g;' | pbcopy(I used this on itself before pasting into this post.)Convert newlines-indicate-paragraphs text to html:
pbpaste | sed 's/^/<p>/' | pbcopy(I use this in putting together the kids text posts.)Any time I want to do find-and-replace when working with software that doesn't support it well.
The way this works is that
pbpastereads from the clipboard as plain text, the intermediate command(s) transform the text, and thepbcopysends it back to the clipboard.While these are the Mac commands it should be similar elsewhere. For example, on Linux I'd use xsel, though that does require paying attention to whether you want PRIMARY (
xsel) or CLIPBOARD (xsel -b).Comment via: facebook, mastodon