Intro to Vim Tip #3 (Visual Mode)

Another well used mode is Visual Mode, which turns your cursor into a hilighter.
open a textfile with several lines of text ad move the cursor to the middle

switch from command mode to visual mode:

v

You’ll notice as you move the cursor around, you highlight different sections from the point you started to the point you left. you can press [esc] to return to command mode.

hilight a few lines of text from command mode:

[shift]v[upkey]

my adding the modifier [shift] when pressing V, you switch to ‘visual line mode’. This allows you to copy paragraphs easily.

hilight a block of text from command mode:

[ctrl]v[upkey][upkey][rightkey]

Now what good is visual mode? we” for deleting or replacing, of course! This is great when you have the following block of text:

           [option min="1"  max="10"   ][/option]
            [option min="11" max="19"   multiplier="10000" ]cp[/option]
            [option min="20" max="38"   multiplier="1000"  ]sp[/option]
            [option min="39" max="95"   multiplier="100"   ]gp[/option]
            [option min="96" max="100"  multiplier="10"    ]pp[/option]

and you’ve decided you no longer need min and max.
– move the cursor in command mode over the ‘m’ in ‘min’ on the first line
– press [ctrl]v[downkey][downkey][downkey][downkey]
– press the right arrowkey until the closing quote on “100” is covered
– press ‘d’
all your text will be gone. But suppose you didn’t want the text to be gone, you wanted to replace it with something else?
– press ‘u’ and the text will reappear
– re-highlight it and press ‘c’ (text should disapepar)
– type your replacement string (use=”false”) and press [esc]
within a moment or two, use=”false” should jump up across all five lines

Visual modes are also useful for narrowing the scope of a search and replace, but I’ll get to that when I cover search and replacing.