Opening EPUB files with Vim

My favourite editor is Vim. It is powerful, extensible, keyboard-oriented, so it is perfect for my work habits. (I am actually looking forward to testing Sublime Text 3 since I discovered it has a Vim emulation mode, but I never have had time yet.)

Working with EPUB files, one wants to be able to inspect/edit them on the fly, without having to decompress them first.

In Vim, all you need to do is adding this line at the very bottom of your ~/.vimrc:

au BufReadCmd *.epub call zip#Browse(expand("<amatch>"))

Now you can open an EPUB file without unzipping it first:

$ vim /tmp/shs/jerome01.epub

Vim will show the list of ZIP entries in the EPUB container:

Of course you can use commands or macros, for example the find shortcut /. To open a file, just select it and hit ENTER, Vim will open it for you:

If you make modifications, just save them as you do with any "regular" file (:w). The corresponding entry inside the EPUB container will be updated accordingly.