Support "bang" operations on selected code blocks

[ijstokes]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
With standard Vim I regularly use block-select to pick a group of lines and then pass them to a piped Unix filter, e.g. :'<,'>!sort|uniq. As best I can tell, this isn't possible with the VSC Vim plugin today.

Describe the solution you'd like
Support "bang" (!) operations when in command mode

Describe alternatives you've considered
I don't know another way to do this. Right now if it is important enough I cut and paste the content into an empty document in Vim, do the operation there, then cut and paste the content back in to Visual Studio Code.

[beaugunderson]

Hmm... Shift-V to select lines, then :!sort or :!tac used to work prior to 1.31.0 and now does not work for me. It now just refreshes all the text on screen.

[beaugunderson]

(It could also have broken in the recent VSCodeVim release; I'm not sure if it was VSCode upgrade that broke it)

[beaugunderson]

I uninstalled some extensions and reloaded and this works again... Could have been a conflict or it could have been that the behavior is just finnicky. Will comment again if it breaks again and a reload fixes it.

[sjackman]

Thank you for VSCodeVim! It's fantastic.

✅:r!seq 10 works for me!
❌!!date does not work for me.
❌:.!date does not work for me.
❌:'<,'>!sort does not work for me (selecting a block with V and then !sort)

Should these work? Please consider this post a feature request if these are not currently implemented.

VSCodeVim 1.10.2
Visual Studio Code 1.38.1

[sjackman]

@tagniam Thank you very much for PR #4989!

✅:r!date always worked for me!
✅:.!date works for me after PR #4989!
✅V:!sort works for me after PR #4989!
❌V!sort does not work for me. (selecting a block with V and then !sort without first :)
❌!!date does not work for me.

[tagniam]

Hey @sjackman, I separated the filter operators like V! and !! into a separate PR, which is pretty much done now. I'll be submitting it asap. Thanks!

[sjackman]

Thank you very much, JR!

[catskul]

AFAICT, this is either broken again, or never completely fixed. I can find no working way to select and sort text using !sort

I have a recollection of it previously working, so it may have broken recently, but I don't trust my memory here as I jump back and forth between vscode and neovim regularly.

[tagniam]

Hey @catskul, yeah I think this was sorta broken by a recent commit, but I have a fix for it and I'll put up a PR soon.

In the meantime you can use sort without the bang to sort a selection.