til/reason/format-the-current-file-within-vim.md

Format The Current File Within Vim

I'm editing a .re file within Vim. I haven't yet wired up refmt to something like ALE for automatic formatting on save. By the time I'm done with my changes, indentation is a mess.

I can still take advantage of refmt to clean up my file.

:!refmt --in-place %

Running that command in Vim will cause the current file to be formatted.

How does it work?

It shells-out to refmt which does all the heavy lifting. The --in-place flag means that the target file will be re-written by the formatted result. The % is a handy Vim shorthand for the path and name of the current file.