Vim Can Open Zip Files?

Posted on February 4, 2007 by David Hogue

I use Vim as my basic text editor in Linux. Today I downloaded a zip file with wget and it downloaded very quickly. I assumed it just saved an error page (as it sometimes does). My first idea to check the error message was vim ScrewTurnWiki-1.0.11-Precompiled.zip and it gave me this:

vim zip

A list of all the files in the zip. If I moved the cursor to a filename and hit enter, it opened the file. It appears that I can edit the file :wq:wq writes the file and quits and it saves my changes back into the zip.

I really didn’t expect that. I figured it would give me a bunch of unprintable garbage if it tried to open a binary file like that. I thought it was cool and just thought I’d share.

Posted in Technology and tagged . Permalink.

2 Responses to Vim Can Open Zip Files?

  1. May 9, 2009 at 1:12 pm

    Duh! That’s true and really practical…sometimes :)

    Thanks

    Philippe Rathé

  2. Pingback: VIM: Modifier un fichier directement dans une archive ZIP | Blogue ≈ Geek