Learn Essential Vim Skills
with Drew Neil, author of Practical Vim
Visual mode
category applies to 8 screencasts:
When UltiSnips is triggered from Visual mode it captures the selection and makes it available to our snippets. We can then insert the selection unchanged with the $VISUAL placeholder, or we can use UltiSnips Python interpolation to transform the text before inserting it back into the document.
Swapping two regions of text is a common task, which normally requires that we make two separate changes to the document. Tom McDonald’s exchange plugin offers an elegant alternative, by providing an operator that swaps two regions of text in one go.
Watch screencastThe gn command (introduced in Vim 7.4) makes it easy to operate on regions of text that match the current search pattern. It’s especially useful when used with a regex that matches text regions of variable length.
When used in Visual mode the p command replaces the selection with the contents of a register. This makes for a smooth workflow when you want to overwrite a selection, or swap the order of two regions of text.
The * command searches for the word under the cursor. That makes sense in Normal mode, but from Visual mode it would be more useful if the star command searched for the current selection, rather than the current word. We can add this feature to Vim using the visual star search plugin.
HAML and ERB are two commonly used ruby templating languages. You may have a strong preference for one or the other, but it’s not always up to you which one you use. I was recently asked to convert several HAML files to ERB format. In this episode, I will demonstrate a couple of Vim macros that helped make short work of the task.
Watch screencastIf you want to edit several adjacent lines with a similar format, you might save a lot of time by making a columnar selection. This episode will demonstrate how to achieve this using Vim’s visual block mode.
Watch screencastDemonstrating miscellaneous tips and tricks gleaned whilst making an ASCII art version of the VimCasts.org logo. Learn how to duplicate lines, copy and paste with visual block mode, search and replace within a visual selection, and how to use macros.
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