Both Sublime Text 2 and VIM have a feature called marks. However, I've not been able to find a use case for it. It feels like everything you can do with it can also be done with other things, often even better.
So the question is: what is the use case of marks?
If you mean marking text lines as in vim, I use it quite a bit.
For example, if you want to quickly go look at something else, you can use ma to mark the current line as a, then go check out something else in the file, then return to where you were with a simple 'a.
Similarly, if you want to delete an unknown number of lines between your current position and somewhere else, use ma, go to that "somewhere else, and just use d'a.
There are many more things you can do with them (such as changing text between your current position and a mark), those two are just the most common ones I use (and I use them a lot).
Related
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.
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.
i. The Problem
My goal is something like the following:
I have a line of text like
Who left the dead mouse in the fridge?
and I want to highlight the first the in green, just this one occurrence. That is, I don't want to syn match ThisMagicWord "\<the\>" or anything that will overzealously highlight other thes.
There is one other requirement, which is that if the user edits the other text on the line, say to
Who on earth left the delicious dead mouse in the fridge?
the highlighting will track with the word the, so long as the user doesn't edit that one particular word.
ii. The Kludge
Now, I have a solution to this. In fact, I am proud of my solution, because it was tricky to think up. But it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good solution.
It turns out that the Unicode character Combining Grapheme Joiner is effectively a no-op in Vim. It produces no glyph, and takes up no width. It is the only such character that I have discovered. So what I do is, I surreptitiously edit the line in question to be
Who left the<CGJ> dead mouse in the fridge?
and then define a rule
syn match ThisMagicWord "the<CGJ>"
I will additionally trigger on BufWritePre and BufWritePost to strip the CGJs out of the file on disk.
iii. The Questions
Is there a no-op character in Vim (or a way to produce one) other than CGJ? Ideally a non-combining character, since the<CGJ> will not match a search for /the, due to the way Vim regexes handle combining characters.
Is there a better way to get at the behavior that I want?
You're right that there's currently no good way to mark static matches and keep them up-to-date when edits are done nearby. My approach would have been worse than your kludge: Include the line / column information in the match (via the \%l and \%v special atoms), and attempting to update those with a combination of marks (works for line changes) and intra-line custom diffing.
Though your use of special Unicode characters is clever, it's (as you admit) a hack. I've asked you for uses in the comments, and am still not completely satisfied / convinced. If you can come up with good, real use cases and current pain points, please direct them to the vim_dev mailing list (best with a functional draft patch attached). The functionality to keep track of such text is basically there (in the Vim internals), it's just not yet tracked and exposed to users / Vimscript. Though Vim development has been (often frustratingly) slow, with a compelling argument on your side, new functionality can and does happen.
How about using marks?
Move the cursor to the word you want, set a lowercase letter mark (e.g. mz), then add highlighting for the word like \%'zthe
I am using vim to edit structured text files.
Sometimes I use search-and-replace feature, and sometimes I am better off with search, followed with a macro, in which case I have several macros at hand, and the choice of one depends upon the particular search result.
In both cases, though I have to spend some effort to arrive at an acceptable regex to satisfy my editing needs. As the regexs are often very long and sophisticated, I end up with both command-line history and search history full of my trial-and-error by-products. The correct regex is not always the last one in a series of attempts, so if I want to reuse the hard-earned regex in a similar editing situation, I have to dig through the pile again.
In search-and-replace scenario I have quickly fixed this with comments that I now put in place at the end of a would-be reusable search-and-replace command string, for example:
:%s/very_long_and_sophisticated_regex/another_long_and_sophisticated_regex/gc "comments on what this search and replace command does and how it might be reused
This way I can easily ignore the piles of stuff in my command line history and quickly find relevant re-use candidates, they are shown in different color. The commands are reusable right away, comments are ignored.
Not so with the search history, though.
Having rtfmed and searched the web, I have not found anything similar. At the moment I put quasi-comments using XXX at the end of reusable search strings, for example:
/search_string_containing_very_long_and_sophisticated_regex XXX comments on what it finds and how it might be re-used
This way I can at least find the right string for re-use, but I have to first delete 'XXX' and the comments.
I wonder if there is a more elegant way of commenting the search strings in search history, similar to command-line history.
You used the word "elegant" in your title, and that I don't have on offer. If instead you can also accept a quirky workaround that relies on Vim internals, here's one.
To restate your problem, it is possible to add comments after Ex :commands,
:AComplicatedExCommand -42 -quux " this fizzes the brobble
:HardToRememberCommand test.txt " use this to brew the framble
but the same is not possible for complicated search /queries (or ?queries).
I've just discovered that you can trick Vim by terminating your search query with a literal null byte:
/[Complicated]*regexp/^# this regexp finds all scrobbles
/another\+Rege\x*p/^# use this to search foo bars
The ^# here is a literal NUL. You can enter it by pressing CtrlV and then 000.
Vim will ignore everything after the null byte, but it'll still show the whole line in the search history, including the "comment".
You can add a regexp branch that never matches, e.g. /\%$indicator\|search string
\%$ is a special Vim atom matching the end of the file. Since that will never match when followed by the indicator text, the first branch (up to \|) will never match and therefore can represent your indicator.
I've created the TaggedSearchPattern plugin to make adding the tag and recalling it even easier.
I have been a terrible person as of late when it comes to Minecraft. I have over-modded it to the point that I need to completely re-write the IDs of them all.
The only problem is that... It'll take about a couple of hours jut to re-write them ONCE, not to mention if any of them collide with the original game. So, in order to save time, I figured I'd use Vim, but after reading through several of the helpful posts on here, I still only know a minimal amount about the replacement feature/command. Here's what I'm trying to do:
Replace this
I:exampleModnamePath.id=16389
I:exampleModnamePat2.id=19657
Etc.
With this
I:exampleModnamePath.id=20000
I:exampleModnamePath.id=20001
Etc.
This continues for a while, and to those who answer, could you please inform me of how it works, so I don't have to ask these questions all the time?
For your perusal:
:let g:num = 1
:g/\.id=\d\+$/exec 's!\.id=\d\+$!.id='.g:num.'! | let g:num=g:num+1'
This is slightly simplified version of my code for (re)numbering chapters in the ebooks.
Idea in a nutshell: use :g to run something over affected lines; use :exec to generate/run new substitution command AND increment the counter. Tried it once and was surprised to find that the trick worked. Was inspired by my previous toying with :g//s/// combo.
I'm not sure what is the rule you are using to choose which number to use for replacement but if all you need
is just a new number that doesn't collide with previous ones you could try just replacing the first digit
with something in a range not used. Something like replacing 16389 with 76389
To do that you could use this :s/Path.id=.\(.*\)/Path.id=7\1
That would search for the string Path.id= followed by a single character and then a group of more characters.
I will replace it with the string Path.id=7 and the group previously selected.
You could make it more selectiv adding letters before Path.id to match only certain types of paths.