I want to delete, say, 5 characters after cursor. How can I do it?
Just like c5w change 5 words, how can I change 5 characters?
It looks like you're not just asking for removal, but also changing, and other stuff.
The point is that w is the text object that moves by words forward, whereas l is what moves character forwards, so
c5l changes the following 5 characters, (as per the comment, you can shorten this to 5s)
d5l deletes the following 5 characters, which you can shorten to 5x
Similarly, just like b is words backward, h is characters backward, so you can do c5h and d5h, for instance.
Related
In a general sense, my question is how do I do something like "dw" or "dd", but instead of deleting characters, I want to over-write with spaces?
E.g. lets say I have text:
first second third
if the cursor is on the "s" in second, I can hit "dw" to get:
first third
but what if I want:
first third
Is there a simple way to do that? An ideal solution would be to use the "d" style syntax (e.g. dw, daw, d$, etc.) but with whitespace replacement instead of deletion.
From the start of the word,
Ctrl-v to enter visual block mode,
e to move to the end of the word (highlighting the word in the process),
r[SPACE] to replace the highlighted characters with spaces.
Because of their very nature (the next character must be consumed), r and R can't work like operators. If you want to replace a motion, visually select it first, and then do r<Space> or r_ or whatever.
In this very specific case:
ver<Space>
or:
viwr<Space>
NOTE: I used ve and viw because the semantics of w are inconsistent so I prefer to avoid it when possible.
I'm learning Vim and can't wrap my head around the difference between word and WORD.
I got the following from the Vim manual.
A word consists of a sequence of letters, digits and underscores, or a
sequence of other non-blank characters, separated with white space
(spaces, tabs, ). This can be changed with the 'iskeyword'
option. An empty line is also considered to be a word.
A WORD consists of a sequence of non-blank characters, separated with
white space. An empty line is also considered to be a WORD.
I feel word and WORD are just the same thing. They are both a sequence of non-blank chars separated with white spaces. An empty line can be considered as both word and WORD.
Question:
What's the difference between them?
And why/when would someone use WORD over word?
I've already done Google and SO search, but their search-engine interpret WORD as just word so it's like I'm searching for Vim word vs word and of course won't find anything useful.
A WORD is always delimited by whitespace.
A word is delimited by non-keyword characters, which are configurable. Whitespace characters aren't keywords, and usually other characters (like ()[],-) aren't, neither. Therefore, a word usually is smaller than a WORD; the word-navigation is more fine-grained.
Example
This "stuff" is not-so difficult!
wwww wwwww ww www ww wwwwwwwww " (key)words, delimiters are non-keywords: "-! and whitespace
WWWW WWWWWWW WW WWWWWW WWWWWWWWWW " WORDS, delimiters are whitespace only
To supplement the previous answers... I visualise it like this; WORD is bigger than word, it encompasses more...
If I do viw ("select inner word") while my cursor is on app in the following line, it selects app:
app/views/layouts/admin.blade.php
If I do viW (WORD) while my cursor is at the same place, it selects the whole sequence of characters. A WORD includes characters that words, which are like English words, do not, such as asterisks, slashes, parentheses, brackets, etc.
According to Vim documentation ( :h 03.1 )
A word ends at a non-word character, such as a ".", "-" or ")".
A WORD ends strictly with a white-space. This may not be a word in normal sense, hence the uppercase.
eg.
ge b w e
<- <- ---> --->
This is-a line, with special/separated/words (and some more). ~
<----- <----- --------------------> ----->
gE B W E
If your cursor is at m (of more above)
a word would mean 'more' (i.e delimited by ')' non-word character)
whereas a WORD would mean 'more).' (i.e. delimited by white-space only)
similarly, If your cursor is at p (of special)
a word would mean 'special'
whereas a WORD would mean 'special/separated/words'
That's a grammar problem while understanding the definition of "word".
I get stuck at first in Chinese version of this definition (could be miss-translation).
The definition is definitely correct, but it should be read like that:
A word consists of:
[(a sequence of letters,digits and underscores),
or (a sequence of other non-blank characters)],
separated with white space (spaces, tabs, <EOL>).
Whitespace characters were only needed when delimiting two same types of 'word'
More examples in brackets as follow:
(example^&$%^Example) three "word" :(example), (^&$%^) and (Example)
(^&^&^^ &&^&^) two "word" : (^&^&^^) and (&&^&^)
(we're in stackoverflow) five "word" :(we), ('), (re), (in) and (stackoverflow)
Another way to say it. If ur coding, and want to move thru the line stopping at delimiters and things line that "() . [] , :" use w.
if you want to bypass those and just jump to words lets say like a novel or short story has, use W.
For coding the small w is probably the one used most often. Depends where you are in the code.
is there a keystroke to replace a region (series of characters, whatever) with a another character (for example whitespace)?
I am not searching for c, because it deletes the existing characters and lets me enter new ones, which may be less or more characters. I want to replace exactly the deleted characters with another char as with R.
For example I have this:
one two three four
and want to replace it with:
one two ----- four
If the cursor is on the beginning of three, I'd like to enter a keystroke, a region (for a example w for end-of-word) and a replacing char (in this case -) to let vim replace all characters in that region with the given replacing char.
you could try:
ver-
to replace selected part with -
same, if you want to replace / fill the "region" with space, you do:
verspace
When you're using vim, you can move forward word by word with w. How do I go backwards?
Use b to go back a word.
You may also want to check out W and B to advance/go back a WORD (which
consists of a sequence of non-blank characters separated with white space, according to :h WORD).
It helps for me to think of it as:
b to go to beginning of current or previous word
w to go the beginning of next word
e to go to the end of current or next word
ge to go the end of the previous word
Try :h word-motions for more details and how to combine them with operations.
use "b" to move back - just tested in vi - works fine.
Alternatively, if you use w, b, W, and B to navigate lines by hopping over words, consider the following alternatives which can be faster if used correctly.
f<char> # jump to next occurrence of <char> to right (inclusive)
or
F<char> # jump back to next occurrence of <char> to left (inclusive)
If your words are separated by spaces
If your words are separated by <space> you can hop over words by spaces:
f<space>;;;; where ; repeats the previous command, so you hop forward by spaces
F<space>;; to hop backwards by space
If your words are separated by punctuation and not spaces
just replace <char> with punctuation, for example .
The punctuation method is not efficient for scrolling through, but if you know where you want to jump, it can usually get there in a jump or two.
What's the easiest way to delete the first 2 spaces for each line using VIM? Basically it's repeating "2x" for each line.
Clarification: here the assumption is the first 2 characters are spaces. So the question is about doing indentation for multiple lines together.
Enter visual block mode with Ctrl-V (or Ctrl-Q if you use Ctrl-V for paste);
Select the area to delete with the arrows;
Then press d to delete the selected area.
Press Esc
Some more options. You can decided which is the "easiest way".
Remove the first 2 characters of every line:
:%normal 2x
Remove first 2 characters of every line, only if they're spaces:
:%s/^ /
Note that the last slash is optional, and is only here so that you can see the two spaces. Without the slash, it's only 7 characters, including the :.
Move indentation to left for every line:
:%normal <<
You could also use a search and replace (in the ex editor, accessed via the : character):
Remove first two characters no matter what:
%s/^.\{2}//
Remove first two white space characters (must be at the beginning and both must be whitespace... any line not matching that criteria will be skipped):
%s/^\s\{2}//
Assuming a shiftwidth=2, then using shift with a range of %
:%<
Two spaces, or two characters? (2x does the latter.)
:[range]s/^ //
deletes two blanks at the beginning of each line; use % (equivalent to 1,$) as [range] do to this for the entire file.
:[range]s/^..//
deletes the first two characters of each line, whatever they are. (Note that it deletes two characters, not necessarily two columns; a tab character counts as one character).
If what you're really doing is changing indentation, you can use the < command to decrease it, or the > command to increase it. Set shiftwidth to control how far it shifts, e.g.
:set shiftwidth=2
I'd try one of two approaches:
Do column editing on the block to delete using Ctrl+V (often mapped to Ctrl+Q).
Record a macro on the first row using q1 (or any other number/letter you want to denote the recording register), then replay that macro multiple times using #1 (to use my previous example. Even better, use a preceding number to tell it how many times to run - 10#1 to run that macro 10 times, for example. It does, however, depends on what you recorded - make sure to rewind the cursor 0 or drop one line j, if that's relevant.
I'd also add: learn how to configure indentation for vim. Then a simple gg=G will do the trick.