In Vim you can use Ctrl+v to select a vertical block of code. This is pretty cool, as this way you can insert a rectangular block of text anywhere in your text. A feature I haven't seen anywhere else yet.
But say I have a text like:
1 abcde
2 abcdefg
3 abcdefg
4 abc
I want to select this full block as vertical block. If I'm on the a of line 1, and start selection, then move down to line 4, I can only move the cursor to the last character c in that line. So the lines above are cut off, giving me this selection:
1 abc
2 abc
3 abc
4 abc
Is there a way to get the full text selected as vertical block?
if you want to select exact 4 lines (including the 1st line), you could:
Ctrl-V$3j
this selects all the texts, but they are not really in a "block", because the first line and the last line have different length.
If you do want have a "block" of text, (appending spaces on those "shorter" lines), you could:
set ve=all
Ctrl-V hhhhh... jjjjj...
by setting ve to all, your cursor could go anywhere. If you like after the selection/copying, you could set the ve back to its original value.
A minute after asking this question i found it out myself. The trick is to press $ on line 4 above. So the full series of keystrokes, if the cursor is on the a of line 1 is:
Ctrl+v3j$
a quick and dirty solution is to insert 4 spaces a the end of line 4.
Related
I have a file in which first 10 lines are the columns of a table and the rest 10 lines are the values of each column.
How can I use norm in VIM to append the values after each column names like this:
column1
...
column10
value1
...value10
-->
column1: value1
...
column10: value10
It is a little similar with this(Vim - Copy Nth word of each line, from line 10-100, to end of line), but I don't know how to go to line 1:10 and append the copied lines.
Any idea will be appreciated!
Fairly naive and crude way to do this, but:
:1,10norm! 10j0d$10kA: ^[p
Explanation:
1,10norm!: for lines 1 to 10, do the following (the ! means any custom mapping you have will be ignored, thanks to D. Ben Knoble for reminding of this):
10j: move down 10 lines
0d$: delete the whole line (not including newline)
10k: move back up 10 lines
A:: append (at the end of the line) ': ' (note the trailing space)
^[: input escape character, going back to normal mode. This (^[) is a single character and is inputted by typing Ctrl-v then escape, not by typing ^[.
p: paste the line deleted in step 3
Another (copy-pastable) way, (ab)using the substitute command:
:1,10s/\v(.*)\ze(.*\n){10}(.*)/\1: \3/ | 11,20d
which does:
1,10s/: for lines 1 to 10, execute the following substitution:
\v: use very-magic regex mode (see :help \v)
(.*): capture the entire current line (eg column1)
\ze: signal the end of the match. This way everything read (and captured) afterwards will not be affected (but can still be read)
(.*\n){10}: skip 10 (including current) lines, ie skip selector to 10 lines below
(.*): capture the line (eg value1)
/: end the 'select' part of the substitute command
\1: \3: replace with captured groups (eg column1: value1)
|: command separator
11,20d: delete lines 11 to 20
Use blockwise-visual mode to perform the operations.
You can enter visual block mode with Ctrl-V and it allows you to select and operate on columns. It also allows you to perform the same action on a block, which you can use to add the : to the lines with the column names.
I'll use normal Vim syntax for keystrokes in my examples, <C-v> means Ctrl-V.
Start by deleting the values into the default register, using a visual block:
11G<C-v>9j$d
Then Add the : to the column lines, also using a visual block:
1G<C-v>9j$A: <Esc>
Then add some more spaces to the first line, to ensure there's room for all the column names to fit:
A <Esc>
Finally, put the visual block at the end of the first line:
$p
It will actually put it on all lines all the way to the end.
This is slightly different from what you specified, since the values are all aligned on the same column. If you want different spacing, you can perhaps use a :s operation to fix spacing.
10:s/: */: /<cr>
Depending on where you pasted (if some column names had more trailing spaces than the first one), you might have some trailing spaces after the pasted values to fix as well, but that should be easy to do using a similar procedure.
Visual block operations are really powerful, it's a great feature to learn and keep in your "toolbox" in Vim. They're really handy with this kind of problem where thinking in "columns" makes the most sense.
I’d like to merge two blocks of lines in Vim, i.e., take lines k through l and append them to lines m through n. If you prefer a pseudocode explanation: [line[k+i] + line[m+i] for i in range(min(l-k, n-m)+1)].
For example,
abc
def
...
123
45
...
should become
abc123
def45
Is there a nice way to do this without copying and pasting manually line by line?
You can certainly do all this with a single copy/paste (using block-mode selection), but I'm guessing that's not what you want.
If you want to do this with just Ex commands
:5,8del | let l=split(#") | 1,4s/$/\=remove(l,0)/
will transform
work it
make it
do it
makes us
harder
better
faster
stronger
~
into
work it harder
make it better
do it faster
makes us stronger
~
UPDATE: An answer with this many upvotes deserves a more thorough explanation.
In Vim, you can use the pipe character (|) to chain multiple Ex commands, so the above is equivalent to
:5,8del
:let l=split(#")
:1,4s/$/\=remove(l,0)/
Many Ex commands accept a range of lines as a prefix argument - in the above case the 5,8 before the del and the 1,4 before the s/// specify which lines the commands operate on.
del deletes the given lines. It can take a register argument, but when one is not given, it dumps the lines to the unnamed register, #", just like deleting in normal mode does. let l=split(#") then splits the deleted lines into a list, using the default delimiter: whitespace. To work properly on input that had whitespace in the deleted lines, like:
more than
hour
our
never
ever
after
work is
over
~
we'd need to specify a different delimiter, to prevent "work is" from being split into two list elements: let l=split(#","\n").
Finally, in the substitution s/$/\=remove(l,0)/, we replace the end of each line ($) with the value of the expression remove(l,0). remove(l,0) alters the list l, deleting and returning its first element. This lets us replace the deleted lines in the order in which we read them. We could instead replace the deleted lines in reverse order by using remove(l,-1).
An elegant and concise Ex command solving the issue can be obtained by
combining the :global, :move, and :join commands. Assuming that
the first block of lines starts on the first line of the buffer, and
that the cursor is located on the line immediately preceding the first
line of the second block, the command is as follows.
:1,g/^/''+m.|-j!
For detailed explanation of this technique, see my answer to
an essentially the same question “How to achieve the “paste -d '␣'”
behavior out of the box in Vim?”.
To join blocks of line, you have to do the following steps:
Go to the third line: jj
Enter visual block mode: CTRL-v
Anchor the cursor to the end of the line (important for lines of differing length): $
Go to the end: CTRL-END
Cut the block: x
Go to the end of the first line: kk$
Paste the block here: p
The movement is not the best one (I'm not an expert), but it works like you wanted. Hope there will be a shorter version of it.
Here are the prerequisits so this technique works well:
All lines of the starting block (in the example in the question abc and def) have the same length XOR
the first line of the starting block is the longest, and you don't care about the additional spaces in between) XOR
The first line of the starting block is not the longest, and you additional spaces to the end.
Here's how I'd do it (with the cursor on the first line):
qama:5<CR>y$'a$p:5<CR>dd'ajq3#a
You need to know two things:
The line number on which the first line of the second group starts (5 in my case), and
the number of lines in each group (3 in my example).
Here's what's going on:
qa records everything up to the next q into a "buffer" in a.
ma creates a mark on the current line.
:5<CR> goes to the next group.
y$ yanks the rest of the line.
'a returns to the mark, set earlier.
$p pastes at the end of the line.
:5<CR> returns to the second group's first line.
dd deletes it.
'a returns to the mark.
jq goes down one line, and stops recording.
3#a repeats the action for each line (3 in my case)
As mentioned elsewhere, block selection is the way to go. But you can also use any variant of:
:!tail -n -6 % | paste -d '\0' % - | head -n 5
This method relies on the UNIX command line. The paste utility was created to handle this sort of line merging.
PASTE(1) BSD General Commands Manual PASTE(1)
NAME
paste -- merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
SYNOPSIS
paste [-s] [-d list] file ...
DESCRIPTION
The paste utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given input files, replacing all but the last file's newline characters with a single tab character,
and writes the resulting lines to standard output. If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other input files still contain data, the file is treated as if
it were an endless source of empty lines.
Sample data is the same as rampion's.
:1,4s/$/\=getline(line('.')+4)/ | 5,8d
I wouldn't think make it too complicated.
I would just set virtualedit on
(:set virtualedit=all)
Select block 123 and all below.
Put it after the first column:
abc 123
def 45
... ...
and remove the multiple space between to 1 space:
:%s/\s\{2,}/ /g
I would use complex repeats :)
Given this:
aaa
bbb
ccc
AAA
BBB
CCC
With the cursor on the first line, press the following:
qa}jdd''pkJxjq
and then press #a (and you may subsequently use ##) as many times as needed.
You should end up with:
aaaAAA
bbbBBB
cccCCC
(Plus a newline.)
Explaination:
qa starts recording a complex repeat in a
} jumps to the next empty line
jdd deletes the next line
'' goes back to the position before the last jump
p paste the deleted line under the current one
kJ append the current line to the end of the previous one
x delete the space that J adds between the combined lines; you can omit this if you want the space
j go to the next line
q end the complex repeat recording
After that you'd use #a to run the complex repeat stored in a, and then you can use ## to rerun the last ran complex repeat.
There can be many number of ways to accomplish this. I will merge two blocks of text using any of the following two methods.
suppose first block is at line 1 and 2nd block starts from line 10 with the cursor's initial position at line number 1.
(\n means pressing the enter key.)
1. abc
def
ghi
10. 123
456
789
with a macro using the commands: copy,paste and join.
qaqqa:+9y\npkJjq2#a10G3dd
with a macro using the commands move a line at nth line number and join.
qcqqc:10m .\nkJjq2#c
How I can move or shift the words in the entire file to the specified column?
For example like below:
Before :
123 ABC
112 XYZS
15925 asdf
1111 25asd
1 qwer
After :
123 ABC
112 XYZS
15925 asdf
1111 25asd
1 qwer
How it can be done using command mode?
Here the thing is we need to shift the 2nd word to the specified column
Here the specified column is 8
except for vim-plugins mentioned by others, if you were working on a linux box with column command available, you could just :
%!column -t
% could be vim ranges, e.g. visual selections etc..
Approach with built-in commands
First :substitute the whitespace with a Tab character, and then :retab to a tab stop to column 8, expanding to spaces (for your given example):
:.,.+4substitute/\s\+/\t/ | set tabstop=7 expandtab | '[,']retab
(I'm omitting the resetting of the modified options, should that matter to you.)
Approach with plugin
My AlignFromCursor plugin has commands that align text to the right of the cursor to a certain column. Combine that with a :global command that invokes this for all lines in the range, and a W motion to go to the second word in each, and you'll get:
.,.+4global/^/exe 'normal! W' | LeftAlignFromCursor 8
I use the Tabular plugin. After installing it, you run the following command:
:%Tab/\s
where \s means whitespace character
I have made two functions for this problem.
I have posted it here : https://github.com/imbichie/vim-vimrc-/blob/master/MCCB_MCCE.vim
We need to call this function in vim editor and give the Number of Occurrence of the Character or Space that you wants to move and the character inside the '' and the column number.
The number of occurrence can be from the starting of each line (MCCB function) or can be at the end of each line (MCCE function).
for the above example mentioned in the question we can use the MCCB function and the character we can use space, so the usage will be like this in the vim editor.
:1,5call MCCB(1,' ',8)
So this will move the first space (' ') to the 8th column from line number 1 to 5.
General text editors can jump to a specific column number of a file by either using movement keybindings or mouse click.
This can only happen if there is already character or whitespace on that column, otherwise the cursor will be lock to the last column which contains that character or whitespace.
For example, in the following line:
1 2 3 4 5
012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
I want to jump to column 35, just before the word lazy, I can click on the mouse to that column or use 8 words movement to get to that position.
If I want to jump to column 50 I can only get to column 43 because that is the newline character and there are no more characters after that.
Now I remember I used a text editor that I could click on the column 50 and automatically will insert the whitespaces and move the newline character to that column, but could not remember which text editor was.
So, I am wandering which text editor is able to do that, or a script for vim that can actually achieve the same effect.
Thank you
:set virtualedit=all
Afterwards 50| will jump to the 50th column, even when the actual line is shorter than that.
More information: :help 'virtualedit'
I’d like to merge two blocks of lines in Vim, i.e., take lines k through l and append them to lines m through n. If you prefer a pseudocode explanation: [line[k+i] + line[m+i] for i in range(min(l-k, n-m)+1)].
For example,
abc
def
...
123
45
...
should become
abc123
def45
Is there a nice way to do this without copying and pasting manually line by line?
You can certainly do all this with a single copy/paste (using block-mode selection), but I'm guessing that's not what you want.
If you want to do this with just Ex commands
:5,8del | let l=split(#") | 1,4s/$/\=remove(l,0)/
will transform
work it
make it
do it
makes us
harder
better
faster
stronger
~
into
work it harder
make it better
do it faster
makes us stronger
~
UPDATE: An answer with this many upvotes deserves a more thorough explanation.
In Vim, you can use the pipe character (|) to chain multiple Ex commands, so the above is equivalent to
:5,8del
:let l=split(#")
:1,4s/$/\=remove(l,0)/
Many Ex commands accept a range of lines as a prefix argument - in the above case the 5,8 before the del and the 1,4 before the s/// specify which lines the commands operate on.
del deletes the given lines. It can take a register argument, but when one is not given, it dumps the lines to the unnamed register, #", just like deleting in normal mode does. let l=split(#") then splits the deleted lines into a list, using the default delimiter: whitespace. To work properly on input that had whitespace in the deleted lines, like:
more than
hour
our
never
ever
after
work is
over
~
we'd need to specify a different delimiter, to prevent "work is" from being split into two list elements: let l=split(#","\n").
Finally, in the substitution s/$/\=remove(l,0)/, we replace the end of each line ($) with the value of the expression remove(l,0). remove(l,0) alters the list l, deleting and returning its first element. This lets us replace the deleted lines in the order in which we read them. We could instead replace the deleted lines in reverse order by using remove(l,-1).
An elegant and concise Ex command solving the issue can be obtained by
combining the :global, :move, and :join commands. Assuming that
the first block of lines starts on the first line of the buffer, and
that the cursor is located on the line immediately preceding the first
line of the second block, the command is as follows.
:1,g/^/''+m.|-j!
For detailed explanation of this technique, see my answer to
an essentially the same question “How to achieve the “paste -d '␣'”
behavior out of the box in Vim?”.
To join blocks of line, you have to do the following steps:
Go to the third line: jj
Enter visual block mode: CTRL-v
Anchor the cursor to the end of the line (important for lines of differing length): $
Go to the end: CTRL-END
Cut the block: x
Go to the end of the first line: kk$
Paste the block here: p
The movement is not the best one (I'm not an expert), but it works like you wanted. Hope there will be a shorter version of it.
Here are the prerequisits so this technique works well:
All lines of the starting block (in the example in the question abc and def) have the same length XOR
the first line of the starting block is the longest, and you don't care about the additional spaces in between) XOR
The first line of the starting block is not the longest, and you additional spaces to the end.
Here's how I'd do it (with the cursor on the first line):
qama:5<CR>y$'a$p:5<CR>dd'ajq3#a
You need to know two things:
The line number on which the first line of the second group starts (5 in my case), and
the number of lines in each group (3 in my example).
Here's what's going on:
qa records everything up to the next q into a "buffer" in a.
ma creates a mark on the current line.
:5<CR> goes to the next group.
y$ yanks the rest of the line.
'a returns to the mark, set earlier.
$p pastes at the end of the line.
:5<CR> returns to the second group's first line.
dd deletes it.
'a returns to the mark.
jq goes down one line, and stops recording.
3#a repeats the action for each line (3 in my case)
As mentioned elsewhere, block selection is the way to go. But you can also use any variant of:
:!tail -n -6 % | paste -d '\0' % - | head -n 5
This method relies on the UNIX command line. The paste utility was created to handle this sort of line merging.
PASTE(1) BSD General Commands Manual PASTE(1)
NAME
paste -- merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
SYNOPSIS
paste [-s] [-d list] file ...
DESCRIPTION
The paste utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given input files, replacing all but the last file's newline characters with a single tab character,
and writes the resulting lines to standard output. If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other input files still contain data, the file is treated as if
it were an endless source of empty lines.
Sample data is the same as rampion's.
:1,4s/$/\=getline(line('.')+4)/ | 5,8d
I wouldn't think make it too complicated.
I would just set virtualedit on
(:set virtualedit=all)
Select block 123 and all below.
Put it after the first column:
abc 123
def 45
... ...
and remove the multiple space between to 1 space:
:%s/\s\{2,}/ /g
I would use complex repeats :)
Given this:
aaa
bbb
ccc
AAA
BBB
CCC
With the cursor on the first line, press the following:
qa}jdd''pkJxjq
and then press #a (and you may subsequently use ##) as many times as needed.
You should end up with:
aaaAAA
bbbBBB
cccCCC
(Plus a newline.)
Explaination:
qa starts recording a complex repeat in a
} jumps to the next empty line
jdd deletes the next line
'' goes back to the position before the last jump
p paste the deleted line under the current one
kJ append the current line to the end of the previous one
x delete the space that J adds between the combined lines; you can omit this if you want the space
j go to the next line
q end the complex repeat recording
After that you'd use #a to run the complex repeat stored in a, and then you can use ## to rerun the last ran complex repeat.
There can be many number of ways to accomplish this. I will merge two blocks of text using any of the following two methods.
suppose first block is at line 1 and 2nd block starts from line 10 with the cursor's initial position at line number 1.
(\n means pressing the enter key.)
1. abc
def
ghi
10. 123
456
789
with a macro using the commands: copy,paste and join.
qaqqa:+9y\npkJjq2#a10G3dd
with a macro using the commands move a line at nth line number and join.
qcqqc:10m .\nkJjq2#c