How to pipe an argument list into Vim

Use something like:

echo file1 file2 | xargs -o vim

The -o option for xargs re-opens stdin as /dev/tty (rather than the default /dev/null) and is essential otherwise Vim will break your terminal when it exits.

This is a useful way of populating Vim’s argument list. It works especially well with modern search tools fd and ripgrep. For example:

$ rg --type py --files-with-matches "logger = .*getLogger*" \
    | xargs rg --files-without-match "logger\." \
    | xargs -o vim

This instructs Vim to open all Python files that create a logger instance but don’t actually use it.