How to write a command in vim to run multiple commands

vim

I've written some commands that perform common functions by placing the following in my .vimrc files:

command! FixWhitespace %s/ \+$//g
command! FixCommas %s/,\S\@=/, /g

Now I'd like to create a 3rd command that runs both of these, but the following doesn't work:

command! Fix FixWhitespace|FixCommas

When I run :Fix from within vim I get the following message:

E488: Trailing characters: FixWhitespace|FixCommas

I'm not sure how this error message relates to what I've done, but I'm obviously not doing something right!

I'm using Vim 7.4.

Best Answer

You need to tell vim using command! -bar that a command can be followed by another command with the pipe symbol |:

command! -bar FixWhitespace %s/\s\+$//e
command! FixCommas %s/,\S\@=/, /ge

Now this is OK:

command! Fix FixWhitespace|FixCommas

but this isn't:

command! Fix FixCommas|FixWhitespace

See :h command-bar for more details.

The error message E488: Trailing characters: FixWhitespace|FixCommas is vim's way of telling you that it didn't expect anything following the FixWhitespace command. See :h E488.

As an aside, your FixWhitespace command doesn't need the g flag since the pattern can match at most once on each line. I'd also set the e flag to suppress the annoying error message. See :h s_flags.

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