How to repeat an edit on multiple lines in Vim

vim

I'm aware that in Vim I can often repeat a command by simply adding a number in front of it. For example, one can delete 5 lines by:

5dd

It's also often possible to specify a range of lines to apply a command to, for example

:10,20s:hello:goodbye:gc

How can I perform a 'vertical edit'? I'd like to, for example, insert a particular symbol, say a comma, at the beggining (skipping whitespace, i.e. what you'd get if you type a comma after Shift-I in command mode) of every line in a given range. How can this be achieved (without resorting to down-period-down-period-down-period)?

Best Answer

Ctrl-v enters visual mode blockwise. You can then move (hjkl-wise, as normal), and if you want to insert something on multiple lines, use Shift-i.

So for the text:

abc123abc
def456def
ghi789ghi

if you hit Ctrl-v with your cursor over the 1, hit j twice to go down two columns, then Shift-i,ESC , your text would look like this:

abc,123abc
def,456def
ghi,789ghi

(the multi-line insert has a little lag, and won't render until AFTER you hit ESC).

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to effectively work with multiple files in Vim

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Related Topic

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.