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up vote 3 down vote favorite

When I want to easily read my PostgreSQL schema, I dump it to stderr and redirect it to vim:

pg_dump -h localhost -U postgres dog_food --schema-only | vim -

This gives:

enter image description here

vim does not have a syntax highlight schema, because it has no filename extension when reading from stdin, so I use the following:

:set syntax=sql

Which gives:

enter image description here

Being the lazy developer I am, I would like to force vim to use the SQL syntax by passing a command line argument, saving me the choir of re-typing set syntax=<whatever> every time I open it with stdin data..

Is there a way to set vim syntax by passing a command line argument?

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

You can use:

vim -c 'set syntax=sql' -
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2  
Note: Works for me even without the colon in the command. – Murphy Mar 10 at 12:27
1  
Shorter variant: vim '+set syn=sql' - – Stéphane Chazelas Mar 10 at 13:01
    
Typically you're better off using set filetype=sql (or ft=sql for short); that will also load the indentation files and such and not just the syntax highlighting... – Carpetsmoker Mar 16 at 7:11
up vote 0 down vote

You can even automate that by putting the command into your ~/.vimrc:

augroup filetype
  au! StdinReadPre * set filetype=sql
augroup END
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