How can I use vim in a pipeline to colorize text?

Question

I'd like to have a command I can insert into a command pipeline that adds color escapes to its input according to vim's syntax highlighting capabilities.

For example:

cat somefile.js | vim - <???> | less

The resulting text would be that of somefile.js, but colorized according to how the current vim configuration would do it in-editor.

It occurs to me that this must be possible. I agree that the example up there isn't what a sane man might call exactly useful, but that doesn't mean the idea never is.

Answer 1

There's a Perl module called Text::VimColor that I've heard will do kinda what you're looking for.

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-VimColor/

But let me ask this: Why do want it to go through less? Why not use vim as a perfectly good file viewer? view - will read from standard input in read-only mode.