Peter's Blog

This is so cool, I have to tell the world how easy it is. Suppose you want to create a new type of virtual file to edit in vim. You can set vim up to automatically call your handlers to read and write files of your magic file type. Here's how: put this in vimrc or $VIM/plugins/mynewfiletype.vim:

   1  python << EOF
   2  
   3  def WriteFile( strFile):
   4      """
   5      Write File
   6      """
   7      #
   8      # Do whatever, send file wherever you like
   9      #
  10      pass
  11  
  12  def ReadFile( strFile):
  13      """
  14      Read file
  15      """
  16      #
  17      # Do whatever, read file from wherever you like
  18      #
  19      pass
  20  EOF
  21  
  22  :au BufWriteCmd blog/* py WriteFile( vim.eval( "expand('<afile>')"))
  23  :au BufReadCmd blog/* py ReadFile( vim.eval( "expand('<afile>')"))
  24  
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In the example above I have said that any file name that starts with 'blog/' is to be handled by my read and write functions instead of being read/written to disk.

Once this is done:

:e blog/blah

will cause vim to call the ReadFile function in order to edit the file 'blog/blah' and

:w

will cause vim to call the WriteFile function to write it.

ReadFile and WriteFile can do whatever you like: go over networks, send email, climb mountains, send morse code, whatever you can code in python.

One little word of warning: under windows, the file names get automatically converted to have backslashes, i.e. strFile above will hold blog\\\\blah instead of blog/blah even if you type in

:e blog/blah

to open the file.