Why doesn't "history | vim" work?

Question

I want to use the Vim to see the result of history (not in the shell). I think history | vim will work (use the result of history as the input of vim), but it returns with:

$history | vim
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
Vim: Error reading input, exiting...

Vim: Finished.

Can anybody explain this?

Answer 1

By piping into vim, you are changing the standard input stream. Because vim is an interactive program, it requires the standard input to be the console.

If you want to view in vim, you should tell it you are reading the file from stdin (by supplying the argument -):

history | vim -

Alternatively, you could just use more or less:

history | more
history | less

These latter two are preferable. If you pipe into vim, it will see your "file" as having modifications, and so you can't quit with a straight :q command. Instead you have to force quit by :q!, which is a bit clunky.

On the other hand, you can exit more or less just by typing q. Have a look at the man-page for these two programs. You'll use them a lot.

---

As recommended by Russell Silva in the comments, you can open vim in read-only mode when you read from stdin. Just supply the -R argument. Then you can quit normally without needing the override:

history | vim -R -

Answer 2

Apart of vim -, you may try bash command substitution like:

vim <(history)

See also:

• How to write whole buffer to standard output from the command line? at Vim SE
• How to edit files non-interactively (e.g. in pipeline)? at Vim SE