When in Vim's visual mode (regular or line), what can you do?
Is it simply for selected part of a line, an entire line, or a block of text?
And then you either copy/past/search/replace on the selected text or are there more tricks to it?
Yes you are correct. Visual Mode is generally used for moving/searching/copying/deleting blocks of text.
However some tricks you can do is pass that block of text to external programs, such as sort.
Assuming you have selected text with visual mode, you can call(for example):
!sort
This will pass the highlighted text, and pass that text to the sort unix command(because of the '!'). Once it sorts the text, it will then replace what you originally highlighted in visual mode with the sorted text.
I often select a column with visual block and insert text for each line of at the selection (with I for before the selection or A for after).
Related
Imagine that [ ] represents a selection. So given
This is pi with the 10th through 20th digits obscured: 3.14159265[3589793238]46264338327950288419716939937510...
the visual selection would be 3589793238.
In Sublime Text, when you have some text selected, and then press Ctrl+h to start the search/replace feature, it will auto-fill the search box with the currently selected text. Is there a way to emulate this in Vim? That is, assuming I am in character-wise visual mode and have made the selection indicated above, I would then press some shortcut combo and Vim would yield :%s/3589793238/ in the command line. That way I could simply complete it like so :%s/3589793238/___/ to replace 3589793238 with ___ throughout the currently open file (without having to manually type 3589793238 into the Vim command-line).
In command mode, you can input the content of any register with <C-R> followed by its name. So you could yank the currently selected text (yanked text is stored in register 0) and then input it with <C-R>0 when writing your substitute command.
To fully automate this, you could add a mapping like so:
xmap <leader>s y:%s/<C-R>0/
Consider the following text file.
Replace and yank this portion Ignore this portion
Suppose I have visually selected the part that says Replace and yank this portion.
I can take one of the following actions at this point.
I can use y to yank the contents into a register, but this destroys the visual selection.
I can use rx to replace each of the characters with an x, but this also destroys the visual selection.
Is it possible to simultaneously put the visual selection into a register and replace each of the characters in the visual selection with an x?
That is, I'm looking for a sequence of commands that result in the selected text being in a register, and each character in the selected text replaced by x. I'm not picky about which register.
Immediately after posting this question, I realized that all I needed was to be able to re-select the text that was just selected.
A quick Google search led to using gv for re-selection.
Thus, the final command sequence to achieve the desired effect is ygvrx. This will first yank the sequence into the register, re-select the previous selection, and then replace the characters.
Visually select the text and press c for change. Type the text you want and press <esc>. The text that was there before (in this case Replace and yank this portion) is now in your "" register, so you can just hit p as soon as you want to paste it.
type :h reg to see a list of all registers and what text you have inside them.
I am right now analyzing some code using VI editor. In my use case, I have selected code spanning 2 Pages by using ESC SHIFT v & selecting all the lines (Spanning 2 Pages). Now the issue I have is I am not able to hold the highlight until I need. As soon as I press ESC and move the cursor the highlight goes off.
How do I hold the highlight until my need
If you just want to reselect whatever you previously selected when you leave visual mode you can use gv. You can't keep highlight when leaving a visual mode, though.
Edit:
If you just need to view selected text and you don't want to be distracted by surrounding text, you can simply copy it to an empty buffer. To do so select your text in visual mode, press y then :new then P. When you finish you can close newly created buffer with :bd!.
Below is a screenshot of me entering visual block mode and pressing "w" to select by word:
How can I select every word in the rows I have selected? Meaning I want the full word in the rows highlighted instead of it getting cut off as shown in the screenshot.
edit: What I want to be able to do is delete a column of words of varying length. In the example screenshot I want to delete the words between the tags, But it could be any column of words.
There are a bunch of plugins for multiple selection, look them up on vim.org.
But I must remind you that visually selecting text is more often than not an unnecessary step. Why don't you explain what you actually want to achieve instead of your failed attempts? Maybe there's a better way...
[edit]
:'<,'>norm dit
seems to be the simplest way to achieve your goal without selecting every word:
and :,+7norm dit would be even better because you don't select anything.
The highlight modes can only select blocks (by cursor, by line, or by rectangular block). You can use a plugin such as vim-multiple-cursors to do what you are trying to do.
The only place where Vim allows a non-rectangular, "jagged edge" visual selection is at the end of the lines, i.e. by extending the blockwise selection with $. Therefore, you'd need to (temporarily) get rid of the trailing </th> (or include it in the selection, but operate in such a way that they are kept intact).
You shouldn't need a selection to work with the text. For example, to delete the text inside the tags, you can use a substitution:
:%s#<th>\zs.*\ze</th>##
You can't. You can only select rectangular blocks in block select mode. Maybe a plugin solves this?
How do I do a Find and Replace within a selection in vi?
Select the text in visual mode (I assume that's what you're doing), then press : to start typing a command, you'll see something like this appear in the command line:
:'<,'>
That means that the command will apply to the selection. Then type s/search/replace/ and hit enter. (Add a g after the third slash if you want to replace all matches, and a c if you want a confirmation for every replace)
Most of the other solutions suggested here work over the ENTIRE line in which the selection occurs, which may not be what you want.
To search and replace ONLY in the selection, first visually select the text, then use a command like so:
:%s/\%VSEARCH/REPLACE/g
This will do the search and replace only in the visually selected section, replacing SEARCH with REPLACE. If you have more than one line selected, this will work over multiple lines too.
If you used Visual Mode to select, then:
:'<,'>s/regex/replacement/options
VIM will place the range ('<,'>) automatically if you go into Command Line Mode (by pressing ':') from within Visual Mode.
Some more help here Search and replace in a visual selection
The range of Ex commands are specified line-wise (see *cmdline-ranges*), and when : is pressed while there is a visual selection, the line range is automatically specified on the command line as '<,'> (see *v_:*), which makes the :s[ubstitute] command operate on the whole lines unless the visual selection boundaries are specified in the search pattern with \%V (see */\%V*), e.g. /\%Vvi\%Vm matches "vim" only within the visual selection, where the end of the selection is specified right before the end of the search pattern since each \%V specifies the next character as the start or end of the visual selection, and thus /\%Vvim\%V would require the visual selection to continue after 'm' to match "vim". Note that using the second \%V in a search pattern isn't necessary unless a match is required to be right at the border of or only partly in the visual selection.
If you want to do a global search and replace (with optional regexes) for all instances in the file, I would do the following:
:%s/foo/bar/g
Omit the g to do a local replace.