I may have a unique situation here. I want gVim (gui version, in Linux) to keep concealed characters concealed no matter what, even when the cursor is on that line or that character gets selected. (It should be as close to if the characters never existed as possible.) Currently the concealed characters show themselves when the cursor enters that line, which causes text to jump around when scrolling and when selecting text.
We are using gView (read-only gVim) to view logs, so as to take advantage of its robust syntax highlighting. Problem is, these logs contain lots of escape characters and TTY color codes, that make reading difficult. (^[33mSomeText^[0m)
I'm using this line to hide them:
syntax match Ignore /\%o33\[[0-9]\{0,5}m/ conceal
Since the files are viewed by non-vim-experts, it looks glitchy and broken when the text un-conceals itself. (And also looks glitchy and broken if the color codes are present, and also looks glitchy and broken if the color codes are blacked-out to become invisible, but still show when selected and appear after copy/paste.)
This should be fine because these files are opened read-only in gview, with an extra set nomodifiable making it even more difficult to save the file. While it's possible to edit and attempt to save the logs, doing so is considered both an invalid thing to do, and a harmless thing to do, and requires enough Vim skills that if someone manages to edit a file they know what they're doing. The problem with being able to edit a line with concealed text does not apply.
If 'conceal' can't be configured to keep hidden text hidden no matter what, an acceptable alternative would be to replace the TTY color codes with whitespace when the file gets opened. But, this has to be done in read-only mode, and we can't have gview throwing up a save dialog on closing the window because the file has been modified by its .vimrc.
Note: I am in full control of the .vim script file sourced when these are read, but cannot control the existence of the TTY color codes or the code that opens the log files in gview. (i.e. I can't pass it through sed or anything like that.) The ideal solution is anything that can transparently nuke the color codes from within a .vimrc, but I'll hear any suggestions. The 'conceal' feature is just my most promising lead.
So, any ideas how to permanently get rid of these on file view without dialogs popping up on close?
:help conceal
When the "conceal" argument is given, the item is marked as concealable.
Whether or not it is actually concealed depends on the value of the
'conceallevel' option. The 'concealcursor' option is used to decide whether
concealable items in the current line are displayed unconcealed to be able to
edit the line.
:help concealcursor
Sets the modes in which text in the cursor line can also be concealed.
When the current mode is listed then concealing happens just like in
other lines.
n Normal mode
v Visual mode
i Insert mode
c Command line editing, for 'incsearch'
'v' applies to all lines in the Visual area, not only the cursor.
A useful value is "nc". This is used in help files. So long as you
are moving around text is concealed, but when starting to insert text
or selecting a Visual area the concealed text is displayed, so that
you can see what you are doing.
Keep in mind that the cursor position is not always where it's
displayed. E.g., when moving vertically it may change column.
Also, :help conceallevel
Determine how text with the "conceal" syntax attribute |:syn-conceal|
is shown:
Value Effect ~
0 Text is shown normally
1 Each block of concealed text is replaced with one
character. If the syntax item does not have a custom
replacement character defined (see |:syn-cchar|) the
character defined in 'listchars' is used (default is a
space).
It is highlighted with the "Conceal" highlight group.
2 Concealed text is completely hidden unless it has a
custom replacement character defined (see
|:syn-cchar|).
3 Concealed text is completely hidden.
Only one command is needed: set concealcursor=n
I might have a better idea—you can pass it through sed (using %!sed) or really do a bunch of other :substitute commands—whatever edits you need to get rid of the color codes.
When you’re done, make sure to set nomodified—this forces vim to think there haven’t been any changes!
I have a file where I store snippets of vim commands. When I need a snippet, I yank it and then execute it with #". The snippets are stored as a script, one line per command, like this:
:s/foo/bar/g
:echo "hello"
:s/1/2/g
Edit: I removed normal mode commands from the example, as they were not part of the problem.
Now this procedure doesn't work anymore: when executing the snippet, it just stops at the first line as if waiting for a newline.
Is there an option somewhere affecting how # is executed? I'm pretty sure it was working some time ago...
Substituting the newline with a ^M character works but makes the file more difficult to handle.
Additional information:
Here's another symptom: when I yank a snippet, if I execute it with #" it stops at the first line as I just explained. But if I execute it with :# it works. But the help file doesn't seem to imply any difference in how the two commands treat the register's content...
I don't think the problem is ^M vs. ^J. Vim macros will treat either one as a valid end-of-line character for recorded macros. I think the problem is extra newlines.
In your example, there's at least one spurious newline after 2j, and unless you're particularly careful when copying the snippet, there's probably another one after 10k as well. These extra newlines are like pressing <Enter> in Normal mode -- they move the cursor down one line.
Here's what I think you want the snippet to look like:
:s/foo/bar/g
2j:s/1/2/g
10k
(Even that's a little misleading -- you'd still have to be careful not to copy the newline after the 10k.)
Why do these extra newlines make such a big difference? Well, for one thing, they cause you to be at least one line away from where you expect to be, which throws off anything you want to do on a particular line (like execute the :s// command).
More importantly, however -- and this is what I think is happening in your example -- is that Vim stops macro playback if the macro attempts to use <Enter> on the last line of a buffer. (I'm guessing Vim considers it an error, and any error causes a macro to stop running.)
Here's an example. Suppose you've got this snippet stored in register x:
4j
:echo "Done"
(Notice the newline after 4j.)
Furthermore, suppose you have the following five lines (and only these five lines) in a buffer:
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
If you now press #x on line 1, the :echo "Done" never executes. Vim moves the cursor down 4 lines to line 5, then attempts to move down one more line because of the extra newline, but it can't. The macro stops executing at that point, before the :echo command gets a chance to run.
However, it works if you change the x register to this:
4j:echo "Done"
So to return to your original example, I'll bet what's happening is that the extra newline after 2j is attempting to move your cursor somewhere it can't go, and that causes the macro to stop. The bottom line of the screen contains the last command executed (:s/foo/bar/g), which makes it look like Vim is waiting for you to press Return.
Finally, I'd strongly recommend using another method to store and execute Vim command sequences. The technique you're using is tolerable for simple cases, but it's fragile and doesn't scale well. Vim has a full scripting language that includes functions and custom commands, and it can be used to do all the things you're doing now, but in a much more robust fashion. Vim scripting is a big topic, but I'd start here:
:help script
Be sure to read about the :normal command, which lets you execute Normal-mode commands (like 2j and 10k) within scripts.
Good luck!
I finally found the culprit. Somehow I had a command mapping on <C-J> in my .vimrc file. When read with the default cpoptions, this turned into a mapping on <NL>.
How I found out: I noticed that when starting vim with -u ~/.vimrc, it would indeed execute yanked snippets. I generated a session file with and without that commandline option and compared them. This way I found out that a different set of cpoptions where used to read the same .vimrc file, so that in one case the mapping was indeed on <C-J>, in the other it was converted into a mapping on <NL>!
If someone has a similar problem, I suggest to look carefully at the currently set command mappings, with :cmap.
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!
I have this dataset in a csv file
1.33570301776, 3.61194e-06, 7.24503e-06, -9.91572e-06, 1.25098e-05, 0.0102828, 0.010352, 0.0102677, 0.0103789, 0.00161604, 0.00167978, 0.00159998, 0.00182596, 0.0019804, 0.0133687, 0.010329, 0.00163437, 0.00191202, 0.0134425
1.34538754675, 3.3689e-06, 9.86066e-06, -9.12075e-06, 1.18058e-05, 0.00334344, 0.00342207, 0.00332897, 0.00345504, 0.00165532, 0.00170412, 0.00164234, 0.00441903, 0.00459294, 0.00449357, 0.00339737, 0.00166596, 0.00451926, 0.00455153
1.34808186291, -1.99011e-06, 6.53026e-06, -1.18909e-05, 9.52337e-06, 0.00158065, 0.00166529, 0.0015657, 0.0017022, 0.000740644, 0.00078635, 0.000730052, 0.00219736, 0.00238191, 0.00212762, 0.00163783, 0.000750669, 0.00230171, 0.00217917
As you can see, the numbers are formatted differently and misaligned. Is there a way in vim to quickly align the columns properly, so that the result is this
1.33570301776, 3.61194e-06, 7.24503e-06, -9.91572e-06, 1.25098e-05, 0.0102828, 0.010352, 0.0102677, 0.0103789, 0.00161604, 0.00167978, 0.00159998, 0.00182596, 0.0019804, 0.0133687, 0.010329, 0.00163437, 0.00191202, 0.0134425
1.34538754675, 3.3689e-06, 9.86066e-06, -9.12075e-06, 1.18058e-05, 0.00334344, 0.00342207, 0.00332897, 0.00345504,0.00165532, 0.00170412, 0.00164234, 0.00441903, 0.00459294, 0.00449357, 0.00339737, 0.00166596, 0.00451926, 0.00455153
1.34808186291, -1.99011e-06, 6.53026e-06, -1.18909e-05, 9.52337e-06, 0.00158065, 0.00166529, 0.0015657, 0.0017022, 0.000740644,0.00078635, 0.000730052,0.00219736, 0.00238191, 0.00212762, 0.00163783, 0.000750669,0.00230171, 0.00217917
That would be great to copy and paste sections with ctrl-v. Any hints?
If you're on some kind of UNIX (Linux, etc), you can cheat and filter it through the column(1) command.
:%!column -t
The above will parse on delimiters inside string literals which is wrong, so you will likely need pre-processing steps and specifying the delimiter for this file for example:
%!sed 's/","/\&/' | column -t -s '&'
Sometimes we want to align just two columns. In that case, we don't need any plugins and can use pure Vim functionality like this:
Choose a separator. In OP's post this is a comma, in my example this is =.
Add spaces before/after it. I use s/=/= ...spaces... / in visual selection for this.
Locate to the longest word and place cursor after it.
Remove all the extra whitespace using dw and vertical movement.
Example of this technique demonstrated below:
I don't find myself needing to align things often enough to install another plugin, so this was my preferred way of accomplishing it - especially that it doesn't require much thinking.
As sunny256 suggested, the column command is a great way of doing this on Unix/Linux machines, but if you want to do it in pure Vim (so that it can be used in Windows as well), the easiest way is to install the Align plugin and then do:
:%Align ,
:%s/\(\s\+\),\s/,\1/g
The first line aligns the entries on the commas and the second moves the comma so that it's flush with the preceding value. You may be able to use AlignCtrl to define a custom mapping that does the whole lot in one go, but I can never remember how to use it...
Edit
If you don't mind two spaces between entries and you want to do this in one command, you can also do:
:%Align ,\zs
This is a great answer using vim macros: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8363786/59384 - basically, you start recording a macro, format the first column, stop recording then repeat the macro for all remaining lines.
Copy/pasted from that answer:
qa0f:w100i <Esc>19|dwjq4#a
Note the single space after the 100i, and the <Esc> means "press escape"--don't type "<Esc>" literally.
Translation:
qa -- record macro in hotkey a
0 -- go to beginning of line
f: -- go to first : symbol
w -- go to next non-space character after the symbol
100i <Esc> -- insert 100 spaces
19| -- go to 19th column (value 19 figured out manually)
dw -- delete spaces until : symbol
j -- go to next line
q -- stop recording macro
4#a -- run the macro 4 times (for the remaining 4 lines)
We now also have the fabulous EasyAlign plugin, written by junegunn.
Demonstration GIF from its README:
Also, Tabularize is quite good http://vimcasts.org/episodes/aligning-text-with-tabular-vim/
You could use the csv.vim plugin.
:%ArrangeColumn
However, this will not do exactly what you have asked: it will right adjust the contents of cells, whereas you have your values aligned by the decimal point or by the first digit.
The plugin has many other useful commands for working with CSV files.
also if you have very long columns it can be handy to disable default wrapping
:set nowrap
:%!column -t
(note in debian you also have a further option for column -n which if you want to split multiple adjacent delimiters)
Here’s a pure Vim script answer, no plugins, no macros:
It might be most clear to start out with my problem’s solution as an example. I selected the lines of code I wanted to affect, then used the following command (recall that entering command mode from visual mode automatically prepends the “'<,'>”, so it acts on the visual range):
:'<,'>g``normal / "value<0d>D70|P`
Except I did NOT actually type “<0d>”. You can enter unprintable characters on the command line by pressing ctrl-v, then the key you want to type. “<0d>” is what is rendered on the command line after I typed ‘ctrl-v enter’. Here, it’s parsed by the “normal” command as the exit from “/” search mode. The cursor then jumps to “ value” in the current line.
Then we simply [D]elete the rest of the line, jump to column 70 (or whatever you need in your case), and [P]ut what we just deleted. This does mean we have to determine the width of the widest line, up to our search. If you haven’t put that information in your statusline, you can see the column of the cursor by entering the normal mode command ‘g ctrl-g’. Also note that jumping to a column that doesn’t exist requires the setting 'virtualedit'!
I left the search term for the :g(lobal) command empty, since we used a visual block and wanted to affect every line, but you can leave off using a visual selection (and the “'<,'>”) and put a search term there instead. Or combine a visual selection and a search term to narrow things more finely/easily.
Here’s something I learned recently: if you mess up on a complex command mode command, undo with ‘u’ (if it affected the buffer), then press “q:” to enter a special command history buffer that acts much like a conventional buffer. Edit any line and press enter, and the changed command is entered as a new command. Indispensable if you don’t want to have to stress over formulating everything perfectly the first time.
I just wrote tablign for this purpose. Install with
pip3 install tablign --user
Then simply mark the table in vim and do
:'<,'>:!tablign
Pretty old question, but I've recently availed myself of an excellent vim plugin that enables table formatting either on the fly or after-the-fact (as your use case requires):
https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode
I have this in my .vimrc.
command! CSV set nowrap | %s/,/,|/g | %!column -n -t -s "|"
This aligns the columns while keeping the comma, which may be needed later for correct reading. For example, with Python Pandas read_csv(..., skipinitialspace=True), thanks Pandas guys for this smart option, otherwise in vim %s/,\s\+/,/g. It may be easier if your column has the option --output-separator I guess, my doesn't and I'm not sure why (my man page for column says 2004, on ubuntu 18.04, not sure ubuntu will get a new version). Anyway, this works for me, and comment if you have any suggestions.
I made a cli tool written in Perl.
You can find it here: https://github.com/bas080/colcise
In Unix the ^ allows you to repeat a command with some text substituted for new text. For example:
csh% grep "stuff" file1 >> Results
grep "stuff" file1
csh% ^file1^file2^
grep "stuff" file2
csh%
Is there a Vim equivalent? There are a lot of times I find myself editing minor things on the command line over and over again.
Specifically for subsitutions: use & to repeat your last substitution on the current line from normal mode.
To repeat for all lines, type :%&
q: to enter the command-line window (:help cmdwin).
You can edit and reuse previously entered ex-style commands in this window.
Once you hit :, you can type a couple characters and up-arrow, and it will character-match what you typed. e.g. type :set and it will climb back through your "sets". This also works for search - just type / and up-arrow. And /abc up-arrow will feed you matching search strings counterchronologically.
There are 2 ways.
You simply hit the . key to perform an exact replay of the very last command (other than movement). For example, I type cw then hello to change a word to "hello". After moving my cursor to a different word, I hit . to do it again.
For more advanced commands like a replace, after you have performed the substition, simply hit the : key then the ↑ up arrow key, and it fills your command line with the same command.
To repeat the previous substition on all lines with all of the same flags you can use the mapping g&.
If you have made a substitution in either normal mode :s/A/B/g (the current line) or visual mode :'<,>'s/A/B/g (lines included in the current selection) and you want to repeat that last substitution, you can:
Move to another line (normal mode) and simply press &, or if you like, :-&-<CR> (looks like :&), to affect the current line without highlighting, or
Highlight a range (visual mode) and press :-&-<CR> (looks like :'<,'>&) to affect the range of lines in the selection.
With my limited knowledge of Vim, this solves several problems. For one, the last visual substitution :'<,'>s/A/B/g is available as the last command (:-<UP>) from both normal and visual mode, but always produces an error from normal mode. (It still refers to the last selection from visual mode - not to the empty selection at the cursor like I assumed - and my example substitution exhausts every match in one pass.) Meanwhile, the last normal mode substitution starts with :s, not :'<,'>s, so you would need to modify it to use in visual mode. Finally, & is available directly from normal mode and so it accepts repetitions and other alternatives to selections, like 2& for the next two lines, and as user ruohola said, g& for the entire file.
In both versions, pressing : then & works as if you had pressed : and then retyped s/A/B/, so the mode you were in last time is irrelevant and only the current cursor line or selection determines the line(s) to be affected. (Note that the trailing flags like g are cleared too, but come next in this syntax too, as in :&g/: '<,'>&g. This is a mixed blessing in my opinion, as you can/must re-specify flags here, and standalone & doesn't seem to take flags at all. I must be missing something.)
I welcome suggestions and corrections. Most of this comes from experimentation just now so I'm sure there's a lot more to it, but hopefully it helps anyway.
Take a look at this: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_command-line_history for explanation.