Edit: I moved this over to the Vi and Vim site: https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/13689/how-to-find-and-replace-in-vim-without-having-to-type-the-original-word
I'd like to optimize my "find and replace" workflow in Vim. It's something I do often, as I'm sure most of you do too. Usually something along the lines of -- copy a block and change the name of a variable in a few places. I know, I know, that probably triggers your "why are you copying and pasting code" reflex, but let's not go down that road... There are plenty of valid use cases :)
I'm well aware of the search and replace commands: :s or :%s but I don't like them. It forces me to type out both the full variable name I'm searching for and what I'm changing it to. Maybe there is a better way fix the the amount of typing with :%s? I often use long descriptive variable names, so that is really a deal breaker for me. I also don't like how typing out a variable name from scratch is typo prone and can consume time and brainpower hunting down typos. I much prefer typing it once, and then copying and pasting to just avoid this entirely if possible.
My current workflow uses some combination of movement/yank/select/search/put to move around the file and replace one by one. It is not great but has the benefit of avoiding typing out full variable names. I might just need to type the first few letters with / or use another movement command (i.e. fx) depending on what's around and then hit ve to select the whole word. I also don't mind that I have to repeat for every instance. I never do a full find replace without confirming each change. But it would be much preferable if I could repeat the replacement action with a single keystroke (which I can't do with this method). each replacement is usually something like n then ve then p (or even worse "0p)
Is there a faster way?
My own workflow is similar to yours:
To start, get the cursor on one instance, possibly with / or by navigation.
Hit * to find the next instance of that word.
Change one instance with cw and then the new variable name.
Then it's fast: n/N to get to the next/previous instance, and . to repeat the last edit.
This workflow gives me the same advantage as yours, in that I can review each case before applying the change, but it's just two keystrokes for each additional change.
Hope this helps.
I like the "visual highlight then edit" approach.
shift + v to highlight the region that you want to modify.
then :s/old/new/r where old is what word you want to replace with new.
r changes the first instance of that word old.
Note* There are options other than r which modify its behavior how you want to replace the word.
I had a situation where I wanted to replace FOO with BAR through out a file. However, I only want to do it in certain places, say, between lines 68–104, 500–537, and 1044–1195. In practice, I dropped markers at the lines of interest (via ma, mb, mc, etc.) and ran the following:
:'a,'b s/FOO/BAR/g | 'c,'d s/FOO/BAR/g | 'e,'f s/FOO/BAR/g
I had to repeat this dozens of times with different search and replace terms s/CAT/DOG, etc., and it became a pain to have to rewrite the command line each time. I was lucky in that I had only three places that I needed to confine my search to (imagine how messy the command line would get if there were 30 or 40).
Short of writing a function, is there any neater way of doing this?
On a related note. I copied FOO to the s (search) register, and BAR to the r (replace) and tried running
:'a,'b s/\=#s/\=#r/ | 'c,'d s/\=#s/\=#r/ | 'e,'f s/\=#s/\=#r/
This would have saved me having to rewrite the command line each time, but, alas, it didn’t work. The replace bit \=#r was fine, but the \=#s bit in the search pattern gave me an error.
Any tips would be appreciated.
If you need to perform a set of line-wise operations (like substitutions) on a bunch of different ranges of lines, one trick you can use is to make those lines look different by first adding a prefix (that isn't shared by any of the other lines).
The way I usually do this is to indent the entire file with something like >G performed on the first line, and then use either :s/^ /X/ commands or block-visual to replace the leading spaces with X on the lines I want.
Then use :g in conjunction with :s. eg:
:%g/^X/s/FOO/BAR/g
:%g/^X/s/BAZ/QUUX/g
Finally, remove the temporary prefixes.
In order to get rid of the necessity to retype the same search
pattern, substitution string and flags, one can simply use the
:& command with the & flag:
:'a,'bs/pat/str/g | 'c,'d&& | 'e,'f&&
(See :help :& for details.)
Instead of using marker use this one :
:68,104s/FOO/BAR/g << substitue from line 68 to 104
This should make your job a little bit easier and clearer.
inspired by #Vdt's answer:
I am not sure but you could write all the substitutions down in a file and source that file i think.
substitutions.vim:
68,104s/FOO/BAR/g
168,204s/FOO/BAR/g
618,644s/FOO/BAR/g
681,1014s/FOO/BAR/g
.
.
.
68,104s/BAZ/BOOO/g
168,204s/BAZ/BOOO/g
and then :so substitutions.vim maybe you can also use this for multiple files of same structure. you can add an e to add an ignore error message, if it is not clear that the substitutions are found on the corresponding line blocks.
With q:, you can recall previous command lines and edit them as a normal Vim buffer, so you can quickly replace FOO and BAR with something else, then re-execute the line with Enter.
The s/\=#s/\=#r/ doesn't work; as you said, this only works in the replacement part. But for the pattern, you can use Ctrl + R Ctrl + R s to insert the contents of register s, instead of \=#s. Preferably use the default register, then it's a simple s//, but you probably know that already.
When performed over a closed fold, substitutions are limited to that fold.
fold each region
put the cursor on one closed fold
perform the substitution: :s/foo/bar<CR>
move to the next closed fold with zj or zk
use the command-line history: :<C-p><CR> or :<Up><CR> to perform the same substitution
repeat…
You can also add the c flag at the end of your substitution so that Vim asks you for a confirmation before actually performing it. This can be tedious if you have lot of matches.
Here's the simplest way to do it
:5,10s/old/new/g
5,10 : startlinenum,endlinenum
I'm getting more and more comfortable with Vim after a few months.
BUT, there is only one simple feature I can't get any answer from the web. That is "Search and replace the results". The problem is that I know:
:/keyword to search, and hit enter "keyword" will be highlighted (of course with set hlsearch)
n, or N to navigate
:% s/keyword/new_keyword/g to replace all occurences of keyword with new_keyword.
BUT, I would think that there must be a way to search, and replace the matched keyword (highlighted) with any new_keyword WITHOUT doing ":% s/keyword/new_keyword/g", which is a lot of typing considering search & replace is such a day-to-day feature.
Any answers/comments will be greatly appreciated!
If you've already done a search you can do a substitution for the same pattern by simply leaving out the pattern in the substitute command. eg:
/keyword
searchs for "keyword", and then:
:%s//new_keyword/g
will replace all occurrences of "keyword" with "new_keyword".
Searching and using the dot command (you didn't meantion you are using the dot command, that's why I highlight it) to repeat the last input action is my best bet here.
I use s///g for search and replace.
Well, since #keyword# and #new_keyword# account for most of the characters, and you need some way to differentiate between them (i.e., a character in vim, or tab between entry fields in dialog in a different editor), you're left with maybe four or five keystrokes beyond that.
So I think you're probably overestimating number of keystrokes and also forgetting that (1) it becomes very natural, and (2) working this way allows you also to naturally modify the action performed by specifying a different range or option flag.
But you can cut down on keystrokes. If you want you can map a key to automatically bring up the command line with '%s/' already in place. e.g.:
nmap s :%s/
The command above would remap 's' (I'm not recommending remapping to that key, but it gives the idea) and set you up to insert the keyword.
Also, you can set the 'gdefault' option to default to substituting multiple times per line. This lets you skip the ending '/g' in your keystrokes:
set gdefault
See ':h gdefault' for help section on that option.
In the end I would say just get used to the default way it works, because using it that way allows you to keep same basic operation when you want to specify different ranges or option flags, and creating a new special map is just another thing to remember. gdefault may be worth setting if you think you're going to want it majority of time, adding /g flag at end when gdefault is set has effect of turning /g off. . .
Move to the first highlighted word then record a macro for replacing the word and moving to the next one, e.g:
gg
n
qq
caw new_word^[
n
q
#q
##
##
...
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