Awk-ward allows you to try out Awk scripts right in your editor; you provide the input as either a file or a buffer and the output is displayed in an output buffer. Best of all, you don't even have to write your program or data to disc, Awk-ward will read straight from the buffer, and you can experiment without breaking any of your programs.

Install Awk-ward like any other Neovim plugin. You also need an implementation of Awk installed on your system. If you have more than one you can specify the path to the binary by setting the g:awkprg variable (global) or b:awkprg (local). The default Awk implementation is whatever your awk command resolves to.

Open a buffer with an Awk program (you do not have to write the buffer to a file). We'll use the following as an example:

# Print records as 'ID Last First'
{print $3, $2, $1}

Now run :AwkWard and two new buffers will open, one for input and the other one for output. Enter some text into the input buffer:

John Doe 123

Once you exit insert-mode the output buffer will show the Awk output

123 Doe John

Note that you did not have to save the input buffer, the output gets updated live. The output also updates live when you edit the program buffer. Suppose now that we want to change our input from a buffer to a file. We can execute the command again with our new settings: :AwkWard -infile data.txt. The input buffer will be closed and the output will show the result from processing the file data.txt.

Awk-ward is feature-complete and ready for use. Keep an eye on the TODO file for new ideas.

The source code is released under the MIT (Expat) license, the documentation and supporting test files under the CC0-1.0 license. See the LICENSES directory for details.