Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!microsoft!steveha
From: steveha@microsoft.UUCP (Steve HASTINGS)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: fill-paragraph in VI?
Summary: Pipe through fmt
Message-ID: <53708@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 22 Mar 90 19:00:12 GMT
References: <Ma1xBQq00W06I2gFpr@andrew.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: steveha@microsoft.UUCP (Steve HASTINGS)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 18

The traditional way to fill paragraphs is to pipe the paragraph through
the fmt program.

The pipe command in vi works like the delete command:  you type the command
to invoke it, and then you specify what it should work on.  Just as "d}"
will delete the rest of the current paragraph, "!}" will pipe the rest of
the paragraph through a command.  You will be prompted for the command to
use; type "fmt" and watch your paragraph fill.

Note that the "}" command wants nroff/troff commands to figure out where
the paragraph ends, but a blank line will also indicate the end of a
paragraph so you can still use this on simple text files.

If you don't have fmt, you can write a simple program to do the same thing.
It should read the standard input and write the standard output.

The pipe feature of vi is one of my favorites.  I often use "!Gsort" to
order a list in a file.