Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Visual Block Change

In Vim, you can replace a selected portion of text across multiple lines with a new piece of text using a Visual-block change. As an example, highlight a portion of text across multiple lines using ctrl-v (blockwise visual mode), now press the "c" key to delete the selected text and enter insert mode. Type in some new text and press the Esc key. The text should be inserted for each row of the selection.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you just want to insert and not replace, use I, "insert", instead of c after the visual block selection is made. I use that a lot to insert comments in front of a contiguous group of lines.

Anonymous said...

Just to be clear, I meant to use "I" as in capital 'i', the letter that comes after H in the roman alphabet.

Travis Whitton said...

Ooh, very cool! I didn't know this but will definitely be incorporating it into my repertoire of regularly used commands.

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

You can also block append to lines, using A instead of I. Depending on how the block was selected, it will append to the end of every line reguardless of line length, and in another case, insert whitespace.

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/visual.html#v_b_A

ocean freight said...

insert is better

alex said...

Wow. VIM maybe powerful, but the commands are just akward. Pressing Esc to apply a command on multiple line instead of aborting the command is just really wierd.