Since you use Linux/Unix, you might also be interested in trying out moreutils. It provides a command called vipe, which reads from stdin, lets you edit the text in $EDITOR, and then prints the modified text to stdout.
So make sure you set your editor to Vim:
export EDITOR=vim
And then you can try these examples:
cat /etc/fstab | vipe
cut -d' ' -f2 /etc/mtab | vipe | less
< /dev/null vipe