Linux – Pipe output of shell command (!) into a new buffer in Vim

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How can I pipe the output of a shell command into a new buffer in Vim? The following obviously wouldn't work, but you can see what I'm getting at:

:!echo % | :newtab

Best Answer

You can't pipe the output of a shell command into a command that creates a new buffer, but you can create a new buffer and read the output of a shell command into that buffer with one entry on Vim's command line. A working version of your example would be

:tabnew | r !echo <c-r>=bufname("#")<cr>

Note that the pipe symbol in this case is a separator between Vim ex commands, not the shell's pipe. See also

:help :tabnew
:help :r!
:help :bar
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