Vic Ramon's
Vim Tutorial
There are three types of selections you can make in Vim: visual, visual line, and visual block. Selections are a core feature that you’ll probably come to love.
Press v to activate visual selection mode, then use motions to expand the
selected area.
Once you are in a visual selection you can perform operations on the selected text.
d or x to delete the selected text
c to change the selected text
y to yank the selected text
You could perform any of these actions without doing a selection, but doing the selection allows you to see exactly what text you are about to modify.
You can press o while in a visual selection to move the cursor to the other
side of the selection box. This allows you to expand the selection in the
other direction.
Press Shift-v to active visual line selection. You can use motions to expand the area of the selection.
You can then use the same commands as a visual selection to modify the text. Visual line is great when you need to to move, delete or yank multiple lines.
Remember that if you need to delete or yank a paragraph (paragraph means all
the lines are touching) then dap and yap can be faster than doing a visual line
selection.
Press Ctrl-v to activate visual block selection. Visual block is unique
because you can select characters across columns.
Use visual-block mode to fixup similar looking text on multiple lines.
Consider this text:
htis is a typo
htis is a typo
htis is a typo
htis is a typo
You could use visual block to highlight the “ht” in the first line, then
hit 3j, type c, then th, then
The standard selection commands all work with visual block.
You also press I to insert new text. At first you will only see
your new text on the first line. Hit escape to exit Insert Mode, then you
will see the new text inserted on every line.
Once you’ve made a visual selection of any kind you can use the substitute command to make a substitution across the selected text. Here’s how:
Make a visual selection
Press :. You will see <,'> appear in the command line.
Type s/old/new/g and hit enter to make your substitution.