With my previous IDE, I had lots of small text processing tools to aid in formatting headers, comments etcera. For example, I would select some lines of comment, press a shortcut, have the text processed and replaced by a new version with timestamps and eye candy.
In PyCharm > IDE settings > External tools, I can indeed configure to send selected text to an external tool, but only as command line arguments. I will need it to a) send the text to STDIN and b) replace the selection with the STDOUT of the external tool.
Is it possible?
This is not currently possible. There's an open feature request for this functionality: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-76371