(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?

haroldag writes "I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what's out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?"

Comments

Vim tips

[icsEater]

Why bother asking slashdot when all the best Vim tips have been collected and compiled? http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips

Re:Replacement

[iggya]

One of vi's best features is the '.' command to repeat what you last did. You can do 'dd' to delete a line, then press '.' (dot) to do it again. Or '100.' to do it 100 times. Typing in numbers before a command repeats the command. Typing in '100ihello[esc]' will insert 'hello' 100 times. Then typing dot will give you 100 more.

On a modern vi you can press up-arrow after pressing colon to get your previous colon command back for editing.

Some examples of changing things on various lines:

# add 'gronk' to the end of every line
# 1 is line 1, $ is the last line
:1,$ s/$/gronk/
# put 'bing' at the start of lines 5-10
:5,10 s/^/bing/
# change foo to bar for all occurrences in the rest of
# the file from where the cursor is
:s/foo/bar/g

Re:Replacement

[pluther]

Very cool. I didn't know how to mark a range like that before.

And, while we're having fun with search and replace, ^ will match the beginning of a line, so if you mark as above, and then change the command to: :'a,'bs/^/#/

you will have commented out a section of your code without having to insert a comment character independently on each line.
Reverse it with: :'a,'bs/^#//

to remove the comments.

Also, you don't have to use the / command as a separator. Anything typed after s will become the separator, so if you want to, say, change all your Windows paths to Unix paths, instead of starting with: :%s/\\/\//g

which, while undeniably cool, can be more easily written as: :%s;\\;/;g

which is a little easier to read.

Two other interesting bits:

u all by itself will undo the last command. Handy when you're testing your commands before posting them to Slashdot.

Also, Slashdot's editor will remove the newlines before any line that starts with a :
In my examples, I put each command on it's own line, but Slashdot keeps appending them to the previous line. Weird.

Re:Just using VIM

[el momia]

:%s/foo/bar/g go through all the file and replace foo by bar :12,20s/foo/bar/ from line 12 to 20 replace foo for bar :s/foo/bar/g in the current line replace foo for bar the g after the last / means to replace all the occurrences of foo vby bar and not only the first one.