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Moving text around in vim

Are you still having problems moving text around in vim? Here are some pointers.

Cheat sheet

move lines with dd and p

Getting started with block mode

  • moving around with o and O
  • delete with x or d
  • yank with y – then put before with P and put after with p
  • yank and put after some short lines y$p
  • insert text into multiple lines with A and I

View the register with :registers

Indent an entire file with gg=G

Posted in Geek Vids.

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By bryanl – January 20, 2010

  • tcol
    The geek vids are great. Thanks!
  • Great job, Bryan! I used to teach vi way back in the day. Here are some more tips for manipulating text:

    You can preface many commands with a number, indicating the number of chars or words or lines you want to work on.

    5dd (delete the next 5 lines)
    10yy (yank the next 10 lines)
    p (put the yanked/deleted lines below the caret)

    Working with words - you can change words or delete words

    3cw (puts you in edit mode to overwrite the next 3 words)
    5dw (delete the next 5 words)

    'u' is Undo

    Joining lines - use capital J on a line to pull up the next line

    Doing the same thing over and over again? Hit period to repeat the last command. Works really well when deleting indentation - 4x (delete 4 spaces), then down arrow, period, down arrow, period, etc

    Capital G is "go". So 30G goes to line 30. ctrl-g shows you status (current line #)

    You can specify blocks using numbers too. Bryan, you touched on this with g and G. If you want to work on lines 5 thru 16, you could type :5,16d (to delete them for example)

    This was always one of my favorite vi cheatsheets: http://www.eec.com/business/vi.html

    Have fun in vim! BTW, I use vim all the time, but for serious coding I stay in TextMate. :)
  • kossnocorp
    Awesome!
  • Great job. Practical and useful. Will be using these commands today! Thank you!
  • good post! I´m getting to know vim, this was very useful!
    would love to see some screencasts on tim pope´s plugins, they seem great!
  • Thanks a lot! More Vim, please.
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