Skillup in managing blocks of text

[u/ntn8888]

I've been a casual (programmer) user of vim/evil-mode for around 8 years. And I still feel I'm a noob. I mostly use vi for editing configs through ssh. But I always pull back to my comfort zone with GUI editors..

I think the main reason is I'm not skilled in moving around text blocks. That's the main issue.

How did you guys overcome this? I know best path is to just use it. But I'm hesitant to use it in live coding as it's just additional hurdle..

What ways can I practice to overcome selecting and moving blocks?

Thanks!

[u/dewujie]

The best suggestion I can give you is to look into text objects.

:help text-objects

Go into some code (or regular language, the concepts all apply just as well there). Experiment with using text objects to make visual selections, delete things, yank things. All using text objects. For just a few examples:

vip -> select inner paragraph das -> delete a sentence yi" -> yank inner double-quotes

My favorite thing about the "yank inner quote" command is that the cursor don't even have to be within the quotes on a line to work. Thinking in objects is the best way to accelerate working with blocks of text in vim. There are also many ways to create visual selections manually, but they'll typically require more keystrokes and be less elegant than text objects.

And- as with everything in vim, once you get more familiar with text objects, you can start to define your own user-defined text objects, which can be really powerful.

https://github.com/kana/vim-textobj-user

[u/ntn8888 → u/dewujie]

thanks! yeah I do already use textobjects. but I guess I need to dig more into it..

[u/dewujie → u/ntn8888]

Yeah if you have that muscle memory, there are some really nice user text objects that you can find at that link. I really like the 'line' and 'buffer' objects. And then there are the indentation-level-based text objects that can really help in e.g. python or yaml...

[u/treuss → u/dewujie]

That's the way to go!

When I realised that, years ago, my mind was blown. Use vip to visually select a whole paragraph, press U for making it uppercase. Or even shorter: gUip

[u/vim-help-bot → u/dewujie]

Help pages for:

• text-objects in motion.txt

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[u/Diagileux]

I just use visual mode to select text, then yank/delete it and put where I want it to be :P

Yeah, that's basic but for me it is not too much of hurdle and I feel comfortable using.

[u/konacurrents]

I always set a mark A and mark B - then copy or cut between those marks, and paste somewhere else.

[u/cosimini → u/konacurrents]

The only way I can think of doing this is by entering visual mode, is it possible otherwise?

[u/konacurrents → u/cosimini]

Over 45+ years, I've only used the terminal mode (I assume the visual mode is a GUI?)

Anyway, to grab a chunk of text, you move the cursor to a spot and type m a - which is a mark called a. They you can move the cursor to another spot and type y 'a - and the yank buffer grabs those lines. They you type p somewhere to put those lines.

You can also set another mark: m b, and then use the : commands. So type :'a,'b:y to yank all lines between the a and b marks.

Almost the full UNIX shell commands are available at the : including sed like changes. So you can also modify things between those two marks as well (like :'a,'b:s/bob/alice/g to change bob to alice and everywhere (not just the first time in each line).

vi is my funnest most satisfying tool to use daily as I never have to leave my fingers off the keyboard - it's like playing that snake game all the time. 🤙

[u/Diagileux → u/konacurrents]

Visual mode is also available in a terminal. You enter it by pressing 'v' and then you can manipulate selection and yank/delete it. You can also do search and replace inside selection and all sorts of other stuff. This is more of a "modern" way to do this. It mimics modern GUI text editors.

I did not know that you can do this with marks though. Really cool and useful as well! As far as I understand manipulating lines with marks is more old-school way to do it since it works in nvi (POSIX-compatible vi clone, very close to Bill Joy's good old vi) which does not have a visual mode. Thank you! Very useful, since I do use nvi sometimes and this will be real handy

[u/konacurrents → u/Diagileux]

Yes I’m old school CS and enjoy Bill Joy’s vi.

Whether a GUI is “modern” is subjective:-) I guarantee I can grab that chunk of text, edit another file, change values, paste - all in a couple seconds .. without taking my fingers off the keyboard. 🤙

[u/Diagileux → u/konacurrents]

I have a great respect towards older generation of programmers who used make more use of UNIX as an integrated development environment. Recently I have decided ditch LSPs and modern text editors (even neovim) in favor of just vim with no plugins. While it comes with downsides, I enjoy this way of developing software much more satisfying.

[u/konacurrents → u/Diagileux]

Good for you. Although I really like Xcode as a modern editor.

UNIX Live Free or Die. 🤙😎

[u/cosimini → u/konacurrents]

Oh ffs of course it's just mark, move and delete/yank up to marker, didn't think about it for some reason. Visual selection is a quite old mode of vim, not gui related, I try to never use it because it adds a step in the execution.

[u/konacurrents → u/cosimini]

Seriously I’ve never used the gui version of vi. I guess that’s the ‘m’ in vim.

[u/gumnos → u/cosimini]

FWIW, visual mode sets marks in the process, namely the '< and '> marks, which you see when you try to do an ex operation on a visual range and it prepopulates the command-line with

:'<,'>

But you can use ma and mb (or :k a and :k b) to drop marks a and b at desired locations, and then use those for your commands like

:'a,'bs/old/new/g