Last Updated: 2025-10-25

I had some poorly formatted SQL on my hands and wished to clean it up. There was no VIM plugin that matched my needs, but I did see a handy looking external tool, sqlformat. How could I run it on the whole file from within Vim?

Generally:

• to append text with the results of a shell command: :read !{cmd} e.g. :r ! ls
• to replace line numbers 3-5 with results of shell command: :{range} !{cmd}, e.g. :3,5 !ls (be careful if results of shell command are longer)
• since % stands for "whole file range", replace the whole file with :% !{cmd}.

Be aware of two differing behaviors of %:

• if before the ! in the command it means the whole file (i.e. the range 1,$)
• if after the ! symbol (i.e. as part of the external command) it means the filename. This allows you to refer to the current file in the command.

Taking all this into account, I came up with a command to format every time an SQL file is saved.:

autocmd BufWritePost *.sql :% !sqlformat