Move entire line up and down in Vim

vivim

In Notepad++, I can use Ctrl + Shift + Up / Down to move the current line up and down. Is there a similar command to this in Vim? I have looked through endless guides, but have found nothing.

If there isn't, how could I bind the action to that key combination?

Edit: Mykola's answer works for all lines, apart from those at the beginning and end of the buffer. Moving the first line up or the bottom line down deletes the line, and when moving the bottom line up it jumps two spaces initially, like a pawn! Can anyone offer any refinements?

Best Answer

If I want to swap one line with the line above I usually do the following

ddkP

Explanation

dd will delete the line and add it to the default register.
k will move up a line (j would move down a line)
P will paste above the current line

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`.