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I usually have the tw=80 option set when I edit files, especially LaTeX sources. However, say, I want to compose an email in Vim with the tw=80 option, and then copy and paste it to a web browser. Before I copy and paste, I want to unwrap the text so that there isn't a line break every 80 characters or so. I have tried tw=0 and then gq, but that just wraps the text to the default width of 80 characters. My question is: How do I unwrap text, so that each paragraph of my email appears as a single line? Is there an easy command for that?
Go to the beginning of you paragraph and enter:
v
i
p
J
(The J is a capital letter in case that's not clear)
For whole document combine it with norm:
:%norm vipJ
This command will only unwrap paragraphs. I guess this is the behaviour you want.
Since joining paragraph lines using Normal mode commands is already
covered by another answer, let us consider solving the same issue by
means of line-oriented Ex commands.
Suppose that the cursor is located at the first line of a paragraph.
Then, to unwrap it, one can simply join the following lines up until
the last line of that paragraph. A convenient way of doing that is to
run the :join command designed exactly for the purpose. To define
the line range for the command to operate on, besides the obvious
starting line which is the current one, it is necessary to specify
the ending line. It can be found using the pattern matching the very
end of a paragraph, that is, two newline characters in a row or,
equivalently, a newline character followed by an empty line. Thus,
translating the said definition to Ex-command syntax, we obtain:
:,-/\n$/j
For all paragraphs to be unwrapped, run this command on the first line
of every paragraph. A useful tool to jump through them, repeating
a given sequence of actions, is the :global command (or :g for
short). As :global scans lines from top to bottom, the first line
of the next paragraph is just the first non-empty line among those
remaining unprocessed. This observation gives us the command
:g/./,-/\n$/j
which is more efficient than its straightforward Normal-mode
counterparts.
The problem with :%norm vipJ is that if you have consecutive lines shorter than 80 characters it will also join them, even if they're separated by a blank line. For instance the following example:
# Title 1
## Title 2
Will become:
# Title 1 ## Title 2
With ib's answer, the problem is with lists:
- item1
- item2
Becomes:
- item1 - item2
Thanks to this forum post I discovered another method of achieving this which I wrapped in a function that works much better for me since it doesn't do any of that:
function! SoftWrap()
let s:old_fo = &formatoptions
let s:old_tw = &textwidth
set fo=
set tw=999999 " works for paragraphs up to 12k lines
normal gggqG
let &fo = s:old_fo
let &tw = s:old_tw
endfunction
Edit: Updated the method because I realized it wasn't working on a Linux setup. Remove the lines containing fo if this newer version doesn't work with MacVim (I have no way to test).
For example if I have some code like:
foo = bar("abc", "def", true, callback);
Is there a nice command to move true to the 1st or 2nd position leaving the commas intact?
P.S as a bonus my friend want to know if this works in Emacs too.
In Vim if you place the cursor at the start of the first word and do dWWP then it will have the desired effect. Here is a breakdown:
dW delete the current word, including the comma and the following whitespace
W move to the start of the next word
P insert the deleted text before the cursor
This will work if there are further parameters after the pair to be swapped - it will need to be modified if there are only two parameters or you want to swap the last two parameters, since it will paste the text after the closing bracket.
Alternatively you could use a regex substitution:
:%s/(\([^,]\+\),\s*\([^,)]\+\)/(\2, \1/
This will find the first two arguments after the open bracket and swap them.
update:
A search of vim.org found the swap parameters plugin, which should do exactly what you want and can handle situations that either of the above methods cannot.
I don't know the answer for vi, but in Emacs, transpose-sexps (C-M-t) will swap two arguments either side of the cursor. Actually transpose-words (M-t) was my first guess, but that leaves the quotes behind.
You need a transpose emacs command. But its limited to not guessing that its transposing in lists, it only considers text (it can't guess the 1st, 2nd word of list). Try this.
Keep your cursor at after comma of true. Use M-x transpose-words. By default it will transpose with next word from the point. Shortcut is M-t.
You can use C-u 2 M-t for transpose with next second word.
Now coming to your question. If you want to move true, to backward 1 word, use C-u -1 M-t, and for backward 2 words C-u -2 M-t.
Am not a VIM guy. So sorry bout that.
If you want to do this as a refactoring, not just as text manipulation, I'd suggest looking into Xrefactory, a refactoring tool for Emacsen (free for C/Java, commercial for C++).
Transposing previous (Ctrl-t p) and next (Ctrl-t n) argument ... add the
following into your .vimrc file:
map <C-t>p ?,\\|(<CR>wd/,\\|)<CR>?,\\|(<CR>"_dw?,\\|(<CR>a, <C-c>?,<CR>P/,<CR>w
map <C-t>n ?,\\|(<CR>wv/,<CR>d"_dw/\\,\\|)<CR>i, <C-r>"<C-c>?,<CR>?,\\|(<CR>w
I want to unwrap text in Vim. When I join lines I get an additional space between sentences.
Why is that?
I have a feeling this is what you really want: gJ
From :h gJ:
gJ Join [count] lines, with a minimum of two lines.
Don't insert or remove any spaces. {not in Vi}
This is handy if you've copied something from a terminal and it's pasted it as a big rectangular block into vim, rather than a single line.
I usually use it in visual mode. Hilight stuff, gJ.
Formatting destroys information. There are many different blocks of text which will result in the same one once formatted. Therefore, there's no way to reverse the operation without prior knowledge (i.e. undo).
Unformatted:
Unformatted text could start out as either all one line, or several, yet look the same when formatted.
Unformatted text could start out as either all one line, or several,
yet look the same when formatted.
Formatted:
Unformatted text could start out as
either all one line, or several,
yet look the same when formatted.
If you want your paragraph all on one line, or if you're okay with a little manual fiddling, you can use J to join lines back together. You can use visual mode to apply the J command to several lines at once, perhaps combined with ap or ip to select a paragraph, e.g. vipJ. Again, you'll still lose some information - multiple spaces at line breaks before formatting will end up collapsed to single spaces. (You can actually join without modifying spaces by using gJ instead of J, but you'll already have lost them when you formatted)
If you're bothered by the extra spaces after sentences (lines ending in !, ?, or .), turn off joinspaces: set nojoinspaces
I guess the simple solution to join the lines without spaces between is:
:j!
With ! the join does not insert or delete any spaces. For the whole file, use :%j!.
See: :help :join.
This is the answer that ended up working for me, none of the above worked in my use case.
Essentially, use gJ like multiple others have said, but highlight all of file, so in command mode typing ggVGgJ.
I still got the extra one space after join, if the line we work on does not end with space. Usually this is the desired behaviour. Example
first line without space
second line
after joining with J, become
first line without space second line
Although in some case, we do not wish to apply it,
myInstance->methodA()
->methodB()
And we would want the join to become myInstance->methodA()->methodB() without any space in between!
Here the helpers mapping i use
nmap <leader>jj Jx
<leader> key can be checked with :let mapleader, default to key \ i believe.
so in normal mode, just \jj to perform join without any extra space!
Say I have the following style of lines in a text file:
"12" "34" "some text "
"56" "78" "some more text"
.
.
.
etc.
I want to be able to remove the quotes surrounding the first two columns. What is the best way to do this with Vim (I'm currently using gVim)?
I figured out how to at least delete the beginning quote of each line by using visual mode and then enter the command '<,'>s!^"!!
I'm wondering if there is a way to select an entire column of text (one character going straight down the file... or more than 1, but in this case I would only want one). If it is possible, then would you be able to apply the x command (delete the character) to the entire column.
There could be better ways to do it. I'm looking for any suggestions.
Update
Just and FYI, I combined a couple of the suggestions. My _vimrc file now has the following line in it:
let #q=':%s/"\([0-9]*\)"/\1/g^M'
(Note: THE ^M is CTRLQ + Enter to emulate pressing the Enter key after running the command)
Now I can use a macro via #q to remove all of the quotes from both number columns in the file.
use visual block commands:
start mode with Ctrl-v
specify a motion, e.g. G (to the end of the file),
or use up / down keys
for the selected block specify an action, e.g. 'd' for delete
For more see
:h visual-mode
Control-V is used for block select. That would let you select things in the same character column.
It seems like you want to remove the quotes around the numbers. For that use,
:%s/"\([0-9]*\)"/\1/g
Here is a list of what patterns you can do with vim.
There is one more (sort of ugly) form that will restrict to 4 replacements per line.
:%s/^\( *\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"/\1\2\3\4/g
And, if you have sed handy, you can try these from the shell too.
head -4 filename.txt | sed 's/pattern/replacement/g'
that will try your command on the first 4 lines of the file.
Say if you want to delete all columns but the first one, the simple and easy way is to input this in Vim:
:%!awk '{print $1}'
Or you want all columns but the first one, you can also do this:
:%!awk '{$1="";$0=$0;$1=$1;print}'
Indeed it requires external tool to accomplish the quest, but awk is installed in Linux and Mac by default, and I think folks with no UNIX-like system experience rarely use Vim in Windows, otherwise you probably known how to get a Windows version of awk.
Although this case was pretty simple to fix with a regex, if you want to do something even a bit more advanced I also recommend recording a macro like Bryan Ward. Also macros come easier to me than remembering which characters need to be escaped in vim's regexes. And macros are nice because you can see your changes take place immediately and work on your line transformation in smaller bits at a time.
So in your case you would have pressed qw to start recording a macro in register w (you can of course use any letter you want). I usually start my macros with a ^ to move to the start of the line so the macro doesn't rely on the location of the cursor. Then you could do a f" to jump to the first ", x to delete it, f" to jump to the next " and x to delete that too. Then q to finish recording.
Instead of making your macro end on the next line I actually as late as today figured out you can just V (visually line select) all lines you want to apply your macro to and execute :normal #w which applies your macro in register w to each visually selected line.
See column editing in vim. It describes column insert, but basically it should work in the same way for removing.
You could also create a macro (q) that deletes the quotes and then drops down to the next line. Then you can run it a bunch of times by telling vi how many times to execute it. So if you store the macro to say the letter m, then you can run 100#m and it will delete the quotes for 100 lines. For some more information on macros:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Macros
The other solutions are good. You can also try...
:1,$s/^"\(\w\+\)"/\1/gc
For more Vim regex help also see http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_patterns.
Start visual-block by Ctrl+v.
Jump at the end and select first two columns by pressing: G, EE.
Type: :s/\%V"//g which would result in the following command:
:'<,'>s/\%V"//g
Press Enter and this will remove all " occurrences in the selected block.
See: Applying substitutes to a visual block at Vim Wikia
My previous question seems to be a bit ambiguous, I will rephrase it:
I have a file like this:
copythis abc
replacethis1 xyz
qwerty replacethis2
hasfshd replacethis3 fslfs
And so on...
NOTE: replacethis1, replacethis2, replacethis3, ... could be any words
How do I replace "replacethis1","replacethis2","replacethis3",.. word by "copythis" word by using minimum vim commands.
One way I can do is by these steps:
delete "replacethis1","replacethis2","replacethis3",.. by using 'dw'
copy "copythis" using 'yw'
move cursor to where "replacethis1" was and do 'p'; move cursor to where "replacethis2" was and do 'p' and so on...
Is there a better way to do this in VIM (using less number of vim commands)?
Since you changed your question, I'd do it this way:
Move to the first "replacethis1" and type cw (change word), then type "copythis" manually.
Move to the next "replacethis", hit . (repeat last operation)
Move to the next "replacethis", hit .,
and so on, and so on.
If "copythis" is a small word, I think this is the best solution.
The digit needs to be included, and there could be more than one instance per line:
:%s/replacethis\d/copythis/g
Given that "replacethis[1-3]" can be arbitrary unrelated words, the quickest/simplest way to do this globally would be:
:%s/replacethis1\|replacethis2\|replacethis3/copythis/g
(Note that you need to use \| to get the pipes to function as "or". Otherwise, vim will look for the literal | character.)
I've been struggling with this for a long time too, I think I just worked out the cleanest way:
Use whichever command is cleanest to put copythis into register r:
/copythis
"rye
Then go to the replacement and replace it with the contents of r:
/replacethis
cw<CTRL-R>r<ESC>
Then you can just n.n.n.n.n.n.n. for the rest of them, or if they're wildly different just go to the beginning of each and hit .
The key is replacing and pasting in one step so you can use . later.
:%s/copythis/replacethis/g
To replace all occurrences of copythis with replacethis. Or you can specify a range of line numbers like:
:8,10 s/copythis/replacethis/g
Note, the /g on the end will tell it to replace all occurrences. If you leave that off it will just do the first one.
create this mapping:
:map z cwcopythis^[
( ^[ is the escape character, you can type it in vim using Ctrl+V Ctrl+[ )
go to each word you want to replace and press z
if u need to do essentially the same action multiple times - swap 1st word of one line with second word of the next line, I say you could record a macro and call it whenever you need to
Have you tried string replacement?
%s/replacethis/copythis
A host of other parameters are possible to fine-tune the replacement. Dive into the Vim help for more details. Some more examples here.
You can remap e.g. the m key in normal mode to delete the word under the cursor and paste the buffer: :nnoremap m "_diwP.
Then you can just copy the desired word, move the cursor anywhere onto the to-be-replaced word and type m.
EDIT: Mapping to m is a bad idea since it is used to mark locations. But you can use e.g. ; anyway.