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vim isn't really something you use in pipelines though, it's a standalone tool.

whoa, you can and absolutely should pipe things in and out of vim - it's natural. Emacs on this actually in disadvantage - it doesn't give you a built-in way for piping from and into buffers, but for that there is emacs piper script: https://github.com/agzam/mxp

Dunno, never had to do this. At most I might set PAGER=vim which means maybe something else is piping for me. If you're piping with vim then fine, but it's not a requirement to use it, unlike smaller utils that are begging to be piped.

> never had to do this

is not a defensible argument (regardless of what you use), see the relevant comment here¹

the bigger point is to get more precise and utilitarian control over text which I already discussed here in this thread², piping in and out of your editor buffers sometimes comes very handy.

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¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876315

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869558

Kinda is, maybe I found better ways to avoid or deal with those scenarios.

`command_a | vim - -c "file /dev/stdout" | command_b`

or, assuming vim is your $EDITOR, you can use vipe:

`command_a | vipe | command_b`

Reply on news.ycombinator.com