Run shell command with pipeline

[aa1ss2]

I want to pipeline each selection to the shell command and display the returned results (like :sh retruned),What should I do?
Used :pipe will changed selection,
Cannot write to pipeline with :sh command,
What is the register to obtain the value of the selection area?

[pascalkuthe]

:pipe-to

[aa1ss2]

thx for answering
:pipe-to do not display results
for example ,used wc to count selection words,

I can only use :pipe wc --word ,and press u ,is there a better way?

[docteurklein]

I agree that the current behavior seems weird to me (helix newcomer) coming from vim where selections, current-filename (%) and such are first-class citizens in any command prompt.

Looks like we could relax the constraints here:

helix/helix-term/src/commands.rs

Lines 5473 to 5476 in 77fe8f2

	let pipe = match behavior {
	ShellBehavior::Replace | ShellBehavior::Ignore => true,
	ShellBehavior::Insert | ShellBehavior::Append => false,
	};

Specifically, allow any shell command to do those things to the command output:

• insert (currently insert-output)
• append (currently append-output)
• replace (currently pipe)
• ignore (currently pipe-to and run-shell-command, although the latter has the side-effect of showing a modal)

But more importantly, all of them should be able to receive the selections as stdin, which is currently not supported due to the aforementioned constraint.

If we were to relax it, the variety of commands could be maybe reduced to a simple modifier to describe the operation (insert, append, …) followed by :pipe, following (to me at least) the helix/kakoune philosophy, no?

[djpowers]

I agree that this would be a handy feature. It looks like #3134 could define a selection substitution as well to cover this use case.

[Euphrasiologist]

Is there any update on this? Or still :pipe over writing selected text?

[weiying-chen]

I also want to be able to select text in Helix (like with :pipe) and return a result (like with :sh). Right now, the closest thing I can do, is to do o = ["yank_to_clipboard", ":sh ~/bash/script.sh"].

[dkonsoul]

Are there any updates to this? Maybe the pipe-to (or maybe a new pipe-to-register), instead of ignoring the output fully, it could write it on a register, so we can paste it if needed.

[lihs-learning]

Migrate from vim. I miss somethings like w !wc and '<,'>! wc, see :help write_c.