My favorite Vim oneliners for text manipulation (muhammadraza.me)

This is pretty cool! would you mind sharing the command to remove it too?

  :%s/^printf("@%d\\n", __LINE__);$//

Wouldn’t this prevent the code from running? It’s just moved into the string literal.

Would this be better?

s/^$/printf("@%d\\n", __LINE__);@

    :s/.*/printf("& -- %d\\n", __LINE__); &

  #define DEBUG_PRINT(stmt) printf(#stmt“ — %d\n”, __LINE__)

This requires that you put have lines between major pieces of codes.

Which I think is a good habit to have anyway. Some people use comments without preceding empty lines (oh why) to delineate code, so they'd have to change the regex a bit to make this work.

  command! StripTrailingWhitespace %s/\s\+$//

I'm more inclined to use it on a regular basis when it has a friendly name, even though I'm pretty handy with regex.

  fun! TrimWhitespace()
      let l:save = winsaveview()
      keeppatterns %s/\s\+$//e
      call winrestview(l:save)
  endfun
  command! TrimWhitespace call TrimWhitespace()

I have these in my .vimrc, to display and auto-trim trailing whitespace:

    augroup trailing_whitespace_show
        autocmd!
        " Make trailing whitespace red.
        autocmd ColorScheme * highlight ExtraWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red
        autocmd BufWinEnter,InsertEnter,InsertLeave * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/
        " Can slow things down, but show trailing whitespace as red while typing.
        autocmd InsertCharPre * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/
    augroup END

    augroup trailing_whitespace_kill
        autocmd!
        " Delete all trailing whitespace on-save.
        autocmd FileWritePre,FileAppendPre,FilterWritePre,BufWritePre *
            \ let w:wv = winsaveview() |
            \ :%s/\s\+$//e             |
            \ call winrestview(w:wv)
    augroup END

  set listchars+=trail:·
  set list

Lesson two after learning how to quit vim should be that q: opens command history. If I had a dollar for every time that window opened and left me wondering 'wtf, quit damnit', I'd have at least 12 dollars.

  # Bloody annoying.
  nnoremap q: :q

Awesome, thank you. I'm forever manually adjusting block comments to be a sensible width so this will help. Probably asking a bit much but do you know if there's a command that can operate on a visual line selection and do the same? e.g. I come across a block comment, add to it, then want to re-width it. Worst case, I guess I could create a command to collapse the lines first then run gqq.

Also useful: gw is like gq but leaves the cursor where it is.

And it's inverse

  vipJ

Your version deletes empty lines, but the version you quoted deletes lines that are blank or only have white space.

Edit to be more helpful:

^ is the start of a line

\s is a space character

* means "zero or more of the previous character"

$ is the end of a line

The v is redundant unless you want highlighting. You can do yi" directly (or ci" or di").

For more fun, activate vim-surround. E.g. to replace surrounding quotes with parentheses: cs"(

You can also use yi" to yank it immediately without selecting it first (replace y with c or d to change or delete, respectively). Replace i with a to include the quotes ("around" rather than "inside"). Replace " with ( [ or { to match other kinds of bracketing characters. And include a number to go more than one set out.

E.g.

    y2a(

means yank everything inside (and including) the second nested pair of parentheses out from the current point.

Doesn’t have to be within, will visually select the contents of the first quotes on the line!

Not an answer to your question, but FYI, command history (q:) might be useful for you if you hadn't come across it yet.

Yes, you can define your own commands to do whatever you want. For things like fuzzy search and frecency sorting, there are a handful of plug-ins and frameworks that can help, including an FZF interface and a few other Vim/Neovim-specific plugins like Telescope and Denite.

That was my first thought when I saw these. I’ve been interested in learning Vim but these look like hell to type.

if you have already used the command you want recently, just start writing the command you want, then press the up arrow to search through your history for commands that start with whatever you've typed so far.

also, a nit pick, if you use Magic mode (\v), that pattern gets way better:

:g/\v(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}/y A

I never want to know the count of words once. If relevant, I want to _always_ see the count.

`g ctrl-g` will do it, but i can barely remember that, so i end up doing `!wc %`

LOL. "simple". I really want to learn vim and be really good at it. I keep trying different tutorials, and I'm starting to be more comfortable with it, but I just keep using sublime text as my main editing tool because it's just easier.

> Isn't there a plugin to just display word count in the corner somewhere automatically?

You can add it to your statusline (or tabline, ruler) with the wordcount() function:

  :let &statusline ..= ' words: %{wordcount().words}'

---

Aside: that "one-liner" doesn't "count the words in the file" at all? It just replaces all words with "1" and echos the last line number. I'm confused because this seems so wrong that I may be missing something? Unless the "67 substitutions on 5 lines" message is intended as the "word count", in which case I submit that 1) this is the ugliest thing I've ever seen, and 2) the author of this article doesn't know Vim all that well (there are so many better/easier ways to do this).

    :%s/\w\+//gn

That one made me cringe hard, the guy would just not use the built-in function or have the decency to sling back into the shell with :! wc -w filename.whatever.

Insanity described in that post.

M-x count-words RET ;-)

wc

I prefer using the standard Unix utilities

  :%!wc

one of my favorite is

  :%!column -t

I work with python a lot and recently learned you can use this

    %! python

If the buffer you have open is a python script. Doesn’t work great if you have a bunch of stdout to read, but good for quick tests

This works in all filetypes, and the indentation amount is set by shiftwidth. Whether tabs or spaces are inserted is controlled by expandtab (for spaces) or noexpandtab (use tabs).

You can use any navigation command as the target, I find myself often using

  >}

to indent every line until the end of the block.

  >ap

    >G

    1G>G 

Check out the comments on that page, someone else had a similar response and pointed out this feature is built-in to vim.

I would advise anyone who wants to master VIM (and NeoVIM) to get used to all the different ways to move through a document. Here's a good wallpaper about that:

https://www.rosipov.com/blog/vim-movement-cheatsheet/

Ever now, after decades of use, I try to incorporate the most efficient methods of moving around the document and around the screen. Sometimes, when I've just held down movement keys (such as 'hjkl') to get to a specific location, I'll go back to where I was and, for example, use the find character command instead as practice.

Oddly I often navigate in a line by typing “f “ (f space) then press . repeatedly until I’ve gotten to the right place. Never occurred to me to navigate within a line using / but that ought to be faster most of the time

> vim is the closest any editor comes to interfacing directly with my brain.

It's funny you mention that. Just today, I had this moment where I realized that if someone asked me which key letters are used to move up/down/left/right, I'd have to pause and think about it.

I've been using Vim for years. Like, my index finger rests on the down key, so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up? Do I actually have to move my index finger to go left? What is my pinky doing most of the time?

It's just funny how all this stuff is burned into my brain but I wouldn't even be able to tell someone the basics without a keyboard in front of me.

I think all quick learning session of vim invariably turns into bootcamp style "learning to code". Jumps straight into what but not how and why.

To know what modal editing is and understand that first is going to help - but then your learning session is over like that without teaching any "tricks".

I like to think of vim as bytecode for text manipulation. You train your brain to emit the bytecode via your fingers.

Yeah, I think you'd have the same issue trying to teach people to play guitar over the lunch hour. It takes a lot of practice to learn vim but it's super rewarding once you do!

I know exactly what you mean. At work people constantly ask me what keys do what and the moment they do my mind goes completely blank. To the point that I even forgot how to use vim for a short while until the conscious part of my brain is preoccupied with something else and suddenly I can use vim again.

The issue with Vim for me is that it takes years for the keybinds to be picked up as muscle memory. Learning takes effort, people can’t learn everything. And there’s an endless amount of things I can learn other than Vim that will give me a more fulfilling life.

As a side note: "Lunch and learn" is work for me. I have a strikt rule, that whenever someone talks heavily about work at lunch, I consider it a meeting - just as "lunch and work". Therefore I will take a work break afterwards.

Lunch is !work for me.

It's just different keyboard shortcuts than the other editors. That is pretty much it. You don't need to be so dramatic.

Also, in the GUI version of vim you have scrollbars, toolbar, and the standard keyboard shortcuts work, too. So you can use it like any other editor.

You're a bad teacher. No shame in that.

OTOH watching someone else use vim when you already know the basics of vim is enlightening

You can but I would mostly use that as a reference.

It's not as much about memorizing strings as it's learning a new language.

I guess it depends. There's almost always multiple ways to do anything in Vim and pros and cons to each.

Using a mapping will save you time if you use the same regex often but you can end up having to remember a lot of shortcuts. I find I forget rarely used mappings.

If you learn the Vim command line and regex well it can be quicker to just type what you want on demand and then use one of the methods repeating it. Then forget about it till the next time you need it.

It's also helpful if you have to use configured Vim occasionally.

I also snarked a bit when I saw your word count example, but immediately reversed course when I saw the JSON formatting one-liner. I will use this. I will use the hell out of it. Thanks!

RIP Bram.

You can do that by setting textwidth to a value, say "set textwidth=80", and hitting the "gq" action. So to format the current paragraph something like "gq}" would do the same as your snippet

I prefer soft wrapping, since it doesn't force your choice of line width on other people.

    :h 'wrap'

Not everyone wants to edit in a browser, maybe many people can't due to their computers spec.

As (neo)vim user, this article is quite low on the tier list for useful information about vim IMO. I appreciate the vim discussion here but not much more to gain from this posting unfortunately.

You can also set et and ts to your taste and then :retab.

> :%s/\s+$//e

Annoyingly, "+" matches literal "+" by default.

You need

  \s\+$

or

  \v\s+$

.

But the whole idea of vim, is that it leverages other tools.

So in that sense calling python is very much a "vim one liner".

It's one aspect of using vim, to use the s or g commands efficiently IMO. But it's not as important as using the regular command + movement vim language stuff.

I never pipe buffers, but I do use sed regex replacement pretty often. Like many other vim aspects I always feel it’s clunky though: vim is a _text_ editor when I want it to be a _code_ editor. I don’t operate on paragraphs or regular expressions, I operate on functions and identifiers and imports.

I don’t think that this list is supposed to be an accurate representation of how people typically use vim. More likely this list was compiled precisely because these uses are somewhat non-standard / non-obvious and therefore worth sharing. Having said that, I do believe that using external tools is much more idiomatic for Vim than Emacs.