value(val_1)
value(val_100)
value(val_10)
I want to select text between parentheses and do it for multiline, for one line I can use f(va( but I don't know how to select for 2 remaining lines.
EDIT (SOLUTIONS)
What I want to is to change text inside parentheses with unique text every line, firstly, I was thinking to select the text, delete it then change the text manually, #rosipov tell there is a plugin to do the selection part and it's great, but #romainl gave me another direction that works too.
f(ci(foo<Esc>jci(bar<Esc>jci(baz<Esc>
Do you want to select this:
value([val_1])
value([val_100])
value([val_10])
or to select that:
value([val_1)]
[value(val_100)]
[value(val_10])
The first is unfortunately not doable. But depending on what you want to do with the selected text, change it for example, a reasonable approximation would be:
f(l<C-v>jj$cnew value)<Esc>
However I'm sure a lot of Vimmers would probably approach the problem with a substitution:
:,+2s/(.*/(new value)
The second is done simply with:
f(lv3/)h
or
f(ljjt)
You will probably be interested in EasyMotion plugin in this case: https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion
With plugin it will be: f(vLeaderLeaderf)c
Or: LeaderLeaderf(avLeaderLeaderf)c
Where c is letter representing 3rd closing parentheses, a represents first opening p.
EDIT: Without plugin it is possible to do it by line number.
Assuming that you work with lines 1-3: f(v3Gf)
Where 3G stands for "go to line number 3", works in both visual and normal modes.
I'm using (mac)vim with tex-suite and would like to have a single regex command (or any other way) to do the following thing:
Change
\textcolor{green}{some random text}
into
some random text
This should be done for all occurrences of \textcolor{green}{} in my tex file...
Any idea?
EDIT: I need it to recognize matching braces. Here an example :
\textcolor{green}{
with $v_\text{F}\sim10^6$m.s$^{-1}$ the massless Dirac fermions
velocity in pristine graphene}.
In my experience, things like this most often crop up during editing, and you might have the search for \textcolor{green}{ already highlighted.
In such a scenario, :global is usually my weapon of choice:
:g//norm d%diBvaBp
diBvaBp: diB (delete inner block), vaB (select block), p (put)
If you have surround.vim installed (recommend it!) you could remove the pair of braces simply doing dsB (delete surrounding {})
:g//norm d%dsB
Of course, you can combine it like
:g/\\textcolor{green}{/norm d%dsB
I just noted a potential issue when the target patterns don't start at the beginning of a line. The simplest way to get around that is
:g//norm nNd%diBvaBp
A more involved way (possibly less efficient) would be using a macro:
/\\textcolor{green}{
gg
qqd%diBvaBpnq
Followed by something like 100#q to repeat the macro
:%s,\\textcolor{green}{\([^}]\+\)},\1,g
Updated as per your updated question:
:%s,\\textcolor{green},\r-HUUHAA-&,g
:g/\\textcolor{green}/normal 0f\df}lvi{xhP$xx
:%s/\n-HUUHAA-//
Quick explanation of how it works:
Put all \textcolor{green} lines onto a line of their own, with 'special' marker -HUUHAA-
Use visual selection vi{ to select everything in between the {}, paste it outside and delete the now empty {}.
Delete leftover stuff including the marker.
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
Say I have the following style of lines in a text file:
"12" "34" "some text "
"56" "78" "some more text"
.
.
.
etc.
I want to be able to remove the quotes surrounding the first two columns. What is the best way to do this with Vim (I'm currently using gVim)?
I figured out how to at least delete the beginning quote of each line by using visual mode and then enter the command '<,'>s!^"!!
I'm wondering if there is a way to select an entire column of text (one character going straight down the file... or more than 1, but in this case I would only want one). If it is possible, then would you be able to apply the x command (delete the character) to the entire column.
There could be better ways to do it. I'm looking for any suggestions.
Update
Just and FYI, I combined a couple of the suggestions. My _vimrc file now has the following line in it:
let #q=':%s/"\([0-9]*\)"/\1/g^M'
(Note: THE ^M is CTRLQ + Enter to emulate pressing the Enter key after running the command)
Now I can use a macro via #q to remove all of the quotes from both number columns in the file.
use visual block commands:
start mode with Ctrl-v
specify a motion, e.g. G (to the end of the file),
or use up / down keys
for the selected block specify an action, e.g. 'd' for delete
For more see
:h visual-mode
Control-V is used for block select. That would let you select things in the same character column.
It seems like you want to remove the quotes around the numbers. For that use,
:%s/"\([0-9]*\)"/\1/g
Here is a list of what patterns you can do with vim.
There is one more (sort of ugly) form that will restrict to 4 replacements per line.
:%s/^\( *\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"/\1\2\3\4/g
And, if you have sed handy, you can try these from the shell too.
head -4 filename.txt | sed 's/pattern/replacement/g'
that will try your command on the first 4 lines of the file.
Say if you want to delete all columns but the first one, the simple and easy way is to input this in Vim:
:%!awk '{print $1}'
Or you want all columns but the first one, you can also do this:
:%!awk '{$1="";$0=$0;$1=$1;print}'
Indeed it requires external tool to accomplish the quest, but awk is installed in Linux and Mac by default, and I think folks with no UNIX-like system experience rarely use Vim in Windows, otherwise you probably known how to get a Windows version of awk.
Although this case was pretty simple to fix with a regex, if you want to do something even a bit more advanced I also recommend recording a macro like Bryan Ward. Also macros come easier to me than remembering which characters need to be escaped in vim's regexes. And macros are nice because you can see your changes take place immediately and work on your line transformation in smaller bits at a time.
So in your case you would have pressed qw to start recording a macro in register w (you can of course use any letter you want). I usually start my macros with a ^ to move to the start of the line so the macro doesn't rely on the location of the cursor. Then you could do a f" to jump to the first ", x to delete it, f" to jump to the next " and x to delete that too. Then q to finish recording.
Instead of making your macro end on the next line I actually as late as today figured out you can just V (visually line select) all lines you want to apply your macro to and execute :normal #w which applies your macro in register w to each visually selected line.
See column editing in vim. It describes column insert, but basically it should work in the same way for removing.
You could also create a macro (q) that deletes the quotes and then drops down to the next line. Then you can run it a bunch of times by telling vi how many times to execute it. So if you store the macro to say the letter m, then you can run 100#m and it will delete the quotes for 100 lines. For some more information on macros:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Macros
The other solutions are good. You can also try...
:1,$s/^"\(\w\+\)"/\1/gc
For more Vim regex help also see http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_patterns.
Start visual-block by Ctrl+v.
Jump at the end and select first two columns by pressing: G, EE.
Type: :s/\%V"//g which would result in the following command:
:'<,'>s/\%V"//g
Press Enter and this will remove all " occurrences in the selected block.
See: Applying substitutes to a visual block at Vim Wikia
My previous question seems to be a bit ambiguous, I will rephrase it:
I have a file like this:
copythis abc
replacethis1 xyz
qwerty replacethis2
hasfshd replacethis3 fslfs
And so on...
NOTE: replacethis1, replacethis2, replacethis3, ... could be any words
How do I replace "replacethis1","replacethis2","replacethis3",.. word by "copythis" word by using minimum vim commands.
One way I can do is by these steps:
delete "replacethis1","replacethis2","replacethis3",.. by using 'dw'
copy "copythis" using 'yw'
move cursor to where "replacethis1" was and do 'p'; move cursor to where "replacethis2" was and do 'p' and so on...
Is there a better way to do this in VIM (using less number of vim commands)?
Since you changed your question, I'd do it this way:
Move to the first "replacethis1" and type cw (change word), then type "copythis" manually.
Move to the next "replacethis", hit . (repeat last operation)
Move to the next "replacethis", hit .,
and so on, and so on.
If "copythis" is a small word, I think this is the best solution.
The digit needs to be included, and there could be more than one instance per line:
:%s/replacethis\d/copythis/g
Given that "replacethis[1-3]" can be arbitrary unrelated words, the quickest/simplest way to do this globally would be:
:%s/replacethis1\|replacethis2\|replacethis3/copythis/g
(Note that you need to use \| to get the pipes to function as "or". Otherwise, vim will look for the literal | character.)
I've been struggling with this for a long time too, I think I just worked out the cleanest way:
Use whichever command is cleanest to put copythis into register r:
/copythis
"rye
Then go to the replacement and replace it with the contents of r:
/replacethis
cw<CTRL-R>r<ESC>
Then you can just n.n.n.n.n.n.n. for the rest of them, or if they're wildly different just go to the beginning of each and hit .
The key is replacing and pasting in one step so you can use . later.
:%s/copythis/replacethis/g
To replace all occurrences of copythis with replacethis. Or you can specify a range of line numbers like:
:8,10 s/copythis/replacethis/g
Note, the /g on the end will tell it to replace all occurrences. If you leave that off it will just do the first one.
create this mapping:
:map z cwcopythis^[
( ^[ is the escape character, you can type it in vim using Ctrl+V Ctrl+[ )
go to each word you want to replace and press z
if u need to do essentially the same action multiple times - swap 1st word of one line with second word of the next line, I say you could record a macro and call it whenever you need to
Have you tried string replacement?
%s/replacethis/copythis
A host of other parameters are possible to fine-tune the replacement. Dive into the Vim help for more details. Some more examples here.
You can remap e.g. the m key in normal mode to delete the word under the cursor and paste the buffer: :nnoremap m "_diwP.
Then you can just copy the desired word, move the cursor anywhere onto the to-be-replaced word and type m.
EDIT: Mapping to m is a bad idea since it is used to mark locations. But you can use e.g. ; anyway.