I'm trying to add the contents of the general buffer to the end of every line. I'm sure this is fairly simple, however, an hour of google searches have lead me nowhere.
This is what my file looks like
::Things to bring camping
--matches
--tent
--sleeping bags
--inflatable bed
--firewood
--camping stove
--skillet
I want to add "::Things to bring camping" to the end of every line.
This is i have figured out so far.
/:: -> brings me to the line in question
Y -> yanks the entire line to the general buffer
I tried :%s/$/\p -> this added a "p" to the end of every line.
My problem is with step 3. How do I tell the "search and replace command" to used the "p" (the contents of the general buffer) instead of the "p" the character
Thank you so much for your help.
Just a suggestion: If you try doing it with a macro, you will be able to use 'p' to add the contents of the general buffer.
Sorry, I had to go into vim and find out.
The way to copy your entire line while in command mode, is:
^r "
(that's CTRL and r, then " )
That should paste the entire line you yanked into your search and replace command
For step three, instead of \p, you should use ctrl-R-a. Hold down the control key and type an uppercase "R", continue holding control, and type a lowercase "a".
For a line with multiple words, use ctrl-R-" instead.
I agree with using a macro - they're very powerful.
In this case I took your list example and positioned it at the first colon.
I used y$ to grab the remainder of the line in the buffer.
Then I recorded the macro - I chose 1.
q1
j$pq
Then you can call it for any number of rows in your list. E.g. 10#1
Learned something figuring this one out ...
:%s/$/\=getreg()/
The \= says that what follows is an expression to be evaluated, and the getreg() call gets the contents of the register, by default the "general buffer" as it used to be called by vi.
Related
How do you select a single line in VIM, when your cursor as at some random point along that line?
I know you can do (v, $) to get to the end of the line, or (v, ^) to get to the start, but when you do (v,$,^) it logically doesn't select the whole line, it selects from cursor, until end, then switches it to cursor until beginning... So this approach fails of course.
Capital V selects the current line in one key stroke; two, if you include the "shift" in shift+v.
V would be direct answer. However, I rarely need to do this because "selecting the current line" is generally part of a larger task. Example of such tasks includes copying the line and deleting the line. There's generally a better way to accomplish the task as a whole. The following are some of the tasks I can think of:
copy the line: yy
delete the line: dd
indent the line: >> or <<
select the current paragraph: vap or vip
delete from the current line to the end of the file 0dG
highlight the current line to see where my cursor is: use :set cursorline in .vimrc file
One case in which I do use V is to select multiple lines that are not a paragraph or some other text object. In this case, there's a tip that might be useful for you: once in the selection mode, you can use o to jump the cursor between the start and the end of the selection.
While this might be more keystrokes.
If you are already in visual mode you can use o to go to the other end of the visual selection.
So you can type
v0o$
To select the whole line. Take a look at :h visual-change
However from the comments it seems you just want to copy the whole line.
Which would just be yy
Just change your order of operations. You almost have it.
^,v,$
Or as suggested by #Kent: because ^ goes to the first non-empty char, if the line has leading spaces:
0,v,$
I know this thread is super old, but I just had the same question. This thread came up first, but I found a different answer than any found here. Use 'V' to select whole lines. That easy. One character to select the whole current line.
Let's say I've typed "abcdefg", with the cursor at the end. I want to delete back to the c, so that I only have "abc" left.
Is there a command like d that includes the current character? I know I could do dTcx, but the x feels like a work-around and I suppose there's a better solution.
No. Backward motions always start on the left of the current character for c, y and d which is somehow logical but also unnerving.
The only "clean" solutions I could think of either imply moving to the char after c first and then do a forward delete:
Tcde
or using visual mode:
vTcd
v3hd
But, given your sample and assuming you are entering normal mode just for that correction, the whole thing sounds extremely wasteful to me.
What about staying in insert mode and simply doing ←←←←?
try this:
TcD
this will leave abc for your example... well if the abcdefg is the last word of the line.
if it is not the last word in that line, you may do:
ldTc
or golfing, do it within 3 key-stroke:
3Xx or l4X
See this answer to a similar question : there is a setting to be allowed to go beyond the end of the line
From the doc :
Virtual editing means that the cursor can be positioned where there is
no actual character. This can be halfway into a tab or beyond the end
of the line. Useful for selecting a rectangle in Visual mode and
editing a table.
"onemore" is not the same, it will only allow moving the cursor just
after the last character of the line. This makes some commands more
consistent. Previously the cursor was always past the end of the line
if the line was empty. But it is far from Vi compatible. It may also
break some plugins or Vim scripts. For example because |l| can move
the cursor after the last character. Use with care!
Using the $ command will move to the last character in the line, not
past it. This may actually move the cursor to the left!
The g$ command will move to the end of the screen line.
It doesn't make sense to combine "all" with "onemore", but you will
not get a warning for it.
In short, you could try :set virtualedit=onemore, and see if your environment is stable or not with it.
Use d?c
That will start d mode, search back to 'c' and then delete up to your cursor position.
Edit: nope, that does not include current position...
I may be misunderstanding your request, but does 3hd$ do it?
I would use vFdd in this example. I think it's nicer than the other solutions since the command explicitly shows what to delete. It includes the current character and the specified character when deleting.
v: enter visual mode (mark text)
F: find/goto character backwards
d: the character "d" that will be included for removal.
d: delete command
Since it is visual mode, the cursor can also be moved before executing the actual removal d. This makes the command powerful even for deleting up to a non unique character by first marking a special character close to the character and then adjusting the position.
Suppose I have the following (* = cursor):
...
*
Kittens
Puppies
Humans
...
How do I yank the "Humans" (cursor relative 3rd line) while leaving the cursor in place?
Preferably in one motion or one (generic) command.
Try this:
:+3y
It uses the range +3 , that it is the point where it will begin to yank. and by default it does one line.
UPDATE: If you wanted to copy both the second and third line without moving cursor, you would use same command but with a range of two points, like:
:+2,+3y
It would copy both Puppies and Humans.
Now, for those who are wondering, based on Birei's answer, you can also do :ny, where n is the line number you want to yank. This is actually what I was looking for when I came to this page, and is helpful if you've got set number on and don't want to count relative lines.
Now, I wonder, how to perform this yank to a particular register! :D
My LineJuggler plugin combines yanks and puts into various short mappings; e.g. with 3[f you can fetch a line 3 lines below the current line and put it below the current line.
I'm hand-editing CNC Gcode text files and need a way to reference locations in the file and on the toolpath.
I want to modify every line in the text file so that it begins with the the upper case letter N followed by the line number, incremented in tens for each successive line, then a whitespace followed by the original text on that line. How can I do this in Vim?
I'm not sure about vi, but (since you're using the vim tag) Vim allows you to accomplish your task as follows:
Adjust the first line by hand (insert a N10 at the beginning of the line), then put the cursor at the beginning of the next line.
Press qb to start recording a macro (the b names the register used to store the macro; feel free to use a different letter -- and definitely do use a different letter if you've got something useful stashed away in b).
Move the cursor upward to the beginning of the previous line (which you have adjusted by hand). Press v to start visual selection mode, then f to move the cursor to the next space on the line (if you use a single space as your whitespace separator, that is; adjust this step if you're using a tab or multiple spaces).
Press y to yank the selected text. This will also remove the visual selection.
Move the cursor to the beginning of the next line. Press P to insert the previously yanked text before the cursor, that is, on the very beginning of the line.
Move the cursor to the numeric part of the line header. Press 10 C-a (1, 0, control + A) to increment that number by 10.
Move the cursor to the beginning of the next line. Press q to stop recording the macro.
Press 10000000 #b to execute the macro 10000000 times or until it hits the end of the file. This should be enough to take care of all the lines in your file, unless it is really huge, in which case use a bigger number.
...or use Vim to write a simple script to do the job in whichever language you like best, then run it from a terminal (or from withing Vim with something like :!./your-script-name). ;-)
The following command will prepend ‘N<line number * 10>’ to every line:
:g/^/exe 'normal! 0iN' . (line('.')*10) . ' '
You can do it easily in Vim with this:
:%s/^/\=line(".")*10 . " "/
This replaces the start of every line with the result of an expression that gives the line number times ten, followed by a space.
I have not timed it, but I suspect it might be noticeably faster than the other Vim solutions.
Cheating answer:
:%!awk '{print "N" NR "0", $0}'
There are two ways to implement that without resorting to external
tools: via a macro or by using Vimscript. In my opinion, the first way
is a little cumbersome (and probably not as effective as the solution
listed below).
The second way can be implemented like this (put the code into your
.vimrc or source it some other way):
function! NumberLines(format) range
let lfmt = (empty(a:format) ? 'N%04d' : a:format[0]) . ' %s'
for lnum in range(a:firstline, a:lastline)
call setline(lnum, printf(lfmt, lnum, getline(lnum)))
endfor
endfunction
The NumberLines function enumerates all lines of the file in a given
range and prepends to each line its number according to the provided
printf-format (N%04d, by default).
To simplify the usage of this function, it is convenient to create
a command that accepting a range of lines to process (the whole file,
by default) and a optional argument for the line number format:
command! -range=% -nargs=? NumberLines <line1>,<line2>call NumberLines([<f-args>])
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