Vi experts, I have two questions concerning the column editing!
First, I already know how to go to the visual mode and do a column edit. But the point is that after shift+I and type, you can only see the first row changing before esc. My question is this, is it possible to make the editing operation visible in all rows? Or is this still an impossible task with the current vim?
My second question is, I want to insert a column with increasing numbers (0...9) or some user defined increasing items such as (monday...sunday) blahblah, what is the best way to achieve this, can I define a few customized functions and then call them?
"Still an impossible task" exposes a wrong assumption: Vim never wanted to be a WYSIWYG editor; just updating the current row requires less screen updates (which can be significant over slow connections; the whole modal editing of vi was partly born out of that necessity).
There are some attempts at "multiple cursors" plugins; with those, you might achieve this, though.
second question
(Note that it is bad style to ask about two unrelated things in a single question.)
Yes, you can do almost anything in "a few customized functions" (but you'd have to clarify your exact use case to get meaningful answers).
Some of that can be done via the speeddating plugin:
{Visual}<C-A> Increment by [count] the component under the cursor on each line of the linewise visual selection. If a component is absent on a line, it is filled in as being [count] higher than on the line above it. This can be used to create sequences. For example, place a "0" on a line followed by 4 blank lines, visually select all 5 lines, and press <C-A> to get a sequence of 1 through 5. You can use letters in visual mode too: make the first entry Z if you want a list starting with A.
Related
This is not a programming question but an inconvenience in the android-studio editor.
If you have an unwanted tab before all your lines, how can you remove them all at once? Now I have to manually go over 50 lines to remove all the tabs to make my code look clean.
If you want to add multiple tabs at once you just select all your code and press the tab button. So I'm looking for the reverse of that.
If I understood you right, you want to beautify the code itself. Fortunately, you don't have to do that manually - at all.
There's a keybinding for it, which may vary by your OS and which layout you use by default. Go to file -> settings -> Keymap and search for auto-indent. Here's what I get on Windows 10 with the default keymap:
Again, which you have may depend on OS (I'm assuming that mainly applies to Mac though) and your keymap, but you can automatically indent your code as per language standards using Ctrl+Alt+I.
Note that this mainly does indentation. If you chose to golf code and want to ungolf it, this will not work. At least it doesn't for Java.
However: This only works with code files the IDE or plugins support. This won't work for i.e. a .txt file out of the box.
If I misunderstood you and you only want to remove tabs without doing the auto-indent, there's at least two other options.
The first option is using multiple cursors. You can add an additional cursor with shift+alt+a mouse click where you want the cursor, or holding the mouse wheel and moving the cursor with the mouse wheel held down. There might be other methods as well, but those are the two I know of.
Once you have multiple cursors, delete the tabs just like normal. But be careful! Doing so might delete the entire line itself. If it does, you can do 1 tab/n units per indent level to the left, and press delete instead.
There's (AFAIK) no limit to how many cursors you can have at once, but you can theoretically do it with 50 lines at once if you want to. But general advice - don't add more cursors than you can see at once. These do run in parallel and it's easy to lose track if you're not careful, and you might end up deleting stuff you didn't want to delete.
And finally, the regex solution:
Note: Be careful with this. If you use it incorrectly, you might get unwanted results.
If you only want to do this in a limited area, highlight it first. Then CTRL+R and you'll be presented with the regular replace menu. Make sure Regex and In Selection are selected.
A base regex to go off is ^([\s]{2,4}|\t). Explanation just for reference:
^ - At the start of the line
(
\s{4} - Match 4 spaces
|\t - Or a tab character
)
Replace with nothing and click "replace all" (or just use the regular "replace" button if you want to double-check before you do anything). This will replace one occurrence of 4 spaces or a single tab character. If you use indentation that isn't based on 4, change the number.
This is only useable and useful if you've found yourself with incorrect indentation that's the same across all the relevant lines - it will not fix indentation mistakes and/or inconsistencies such as 3-space indentation when you want 4, or random indetation for the same block. Use the first or alternatively second method for that instead.
How can I select different portions of multiple non-contiguous lines and replace them with the same/different text?
Example: Let's say my buffer looks like this-
Roses are reed,
Violets aree blue,
Sugaar is sweet,
And so are you,
I want to change in 1st line the 3rd word ('reed') to 'red, yellow and green', in 2nd line 'aree' to 'are', in 3rd line 'Sugaar' to 'Sugar and molasses' and in 4th line 'you,' to 'you.'.
Say my cursor is at 'R' of 'Roses'. I want to select all four of these wrongs at once and nothing other the wrongs. After I'm done selecting I want to be able to move to 'reed' by pressing some key (say Ctrl+j), then after changing I want to be able to press some key (say Ctrl+j) and move the next visual selection which is 'aree'.
Is there any plugin that does this?
There are multiple cursors plugins that attempt to create parallel editing functionality seen in other editors to Vim (which is difficult). If I understand your use case right, that wouldn't help here, though, because all places would be edited in the same way (so reed, areee, etc. would all be replaced with the same red).
Instead, what you seem to be asking for, is a way to search for all wrongly spelled words, and then edit them one by one, individually. You can do this with standard search, using regular expression branches:
/reed\|areee\|Sugaar\|you,/
You can then simply press next to go to the next match after you're done. Note that the branches have to be unique (so I searched for you, instead of simply ,). Adding word boundaries (\<reed\> instead of reed) is a good idea, too.
plugin recommendations
multiple cursors is a famous plugin for parallel editing
My SearchAlternatives plugin lets you add the current word under the cursor as a search branch with a quick (<Leader>+ by default) key mapping. (However, if you're already on the word, why not correct it immediately?)
My SpellCheck plugin populates the quickfix list with all misspelled words and locations. You can then use quickfix navigation (e.g. :cnext) to quickly go to each. The plugin also offers mappings to fix spelling errors directly from the quickfix list.
This question already has answers here:
Quickest way to change a pair of parenthesis to brackets in vim
(6 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I am looking for a VIM key combo for changing something like
blahblah["hello"]
to
blahblah("hello")
My best effort so far is
0f[yi[%c%()^["0P^[
but anything better would be much appreciated.
BTW, my combo works by doing:
find the first instance of [ (you get my point),
yank the insides (which of course means to register 0 by default, and it leaves the cursor on the first "),
move the cursor back onto the first instance of [ with %,
delete the whole [...] bit and go into insert mode,
write () and <Esc> out of insert mode,
paste the contents of register 0 in between the ().
I was hoping to have a muscle-memorable key combination that I could use for things like this where you want to 'keep the contents but change the surroundings'.
My proposal, if you reduce it to the minimum (and use ca[ rather than %c% -- credit to this SO for the a motion that I had not really known about) is not too bad because it is the sort of thing you can invent again once you know it is possible:
yi[ca[()<Esc>"0P
However, it occurred to me that a search-and-replace is going to be just the right kind of solution when you need to do a few of these in a file. Here is my best effort:
select the area in visual mode (I tend to use VISUAL LINE mode as a default),
then :s/\[\(.\{-}\)\]/(\1)/g<Enter> and you're done.
That itself looks a bit mad, but it is just a simple example of so-called backreferencing so I was quite happy to have had to get that clear in my mind too.
Suppose I am working on three functions and I will be jumping back and forth between them. Suppose functions A,B, and C are on lines a, b and c. Is there a way to bind the following (which jump to the line position)
:a
:b
:c
to keys during runtime so I can easily jump to these positions. If you play Starcraft this is kind of like binding a selected group of units to your number keys, and then using the number keys to quickly change your selected group (or jump to the designated line, in this case).
Or is there another way of getting a similar result that I am unaware of? I just recently discovered that =% autoformats your tabs within the highlighted brace, so I am pretty new to vim.
Thanks.
You want to use marks. They allow you to save your current position in the file to a variable.
In Starcraft, you "Hotkey" your guys by pressing Ctrl+1 to tag them, then tap 1 to select them again.
In Vim, you "Mark" a place by pressing [m], then [a](or any letter) to mark them, then [`], then [a] to go back to that mark.
So you have hotkeys to 1,2,3,4, etc in SC, but marks are a-z(and probably other characters but I'm not sure) in Vim.
For more technical info try
:help marks
I have been using vim for a couple of years now, and though I have learnt a lot of time saving shortcuts, but I have never used the Visual mode, which is supposed to be all powerful :
... Visual block mode (to edit columns) is something many editors lack, but that I can't live without. I have shocked and awed people at work using just this, making some edit in a few keypresses that someone would've otherwise spent ten minutes doing manually.
I want to understand why and when should I be using Visual mode.
Can someone give me an example of "making some edit in a few keypresses that someone would've otherwise spent ten minutes doing manually"?
If you see CTRL-CCTRL-V and recognise what it does, you should use visual mode.
If, like me, you see A:esc0df:$p$x as an edit command, don't bother :-)
When I use visual mode, it's to select whole lines or blocks. For example you can do [esc][shift+v][y] to copy the currently line I'm on. Here's more information.
Visual mode allows you to perform an operation on a block of text. It is the only way to perform an operation on a block in Vim.
A simple example of this would be copying or moving text.
A more advanced example would be sorting the lines in a certain part of a file. You can do this by entering visual mode, selecting a block of text, pressing Esc to enter command mode, and typing !sort. You can see more details about his example and how it works here: http://www.oualline.com/vim-cook.html#sorting_visual
I actually just did a screencast showing off great uses for visual mode. You can check it out at http://lococast.net/archives/241
As other's have said, it's great for doing any sorts of editing (edit, remove, search/replace) withing a specific range of code.
Insert a column of commas.
Delete a column of commas.
Act on rectangular selections.
Act on a section of text that is not a line or word.
Several good examples have already been given. Here are some others.
I also use visual mode:
To swap two regions of text.
To refactor out variables, types, and functions.
To surround the selection with pair of things (usually brackets)(NB: surround.vim also does this I guess), but also with control statements.
But simply most of the time to have a more interactive way to yank or change text.
To paste over without overwriting the current unnamed register.
To highlight the current selection (with Mark.vim)
And to do many other things I don't remember right know.