usr_26.txt For Vim version 9.1. Last change: 2025 Nov 09 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Repeating An editing task is hardly ever unstructured. A change often needs to be made several times. In this chapter a number of useful ways to repeat a change will be explained. 26.1 Repeating with Visual mode 26.2 Add and subtract 26.3 Making a change in many files 26.4 Using Vim from a shell script Next chapter: usr_27.txt Search commands and patterns Previous chapter: usr_25.txt Editing formatted text Table of contents: usr_toc.txt ============================================================================== 26.1 Repeating with Visual mode Visual mode is very handy for making a change in any sequence of lines. You can see the highlighted text, thus you can check if the correct lines are changed. But making the selection takes some typing. The "gv" command selects the same area again. This allows you to do another operation on the same text. Suppose you have some lines where you want to change "2001" to "2002" and "2000" to "2001": The financial results for 2001 are better than for 2000. The income increased by 50%, even though 2001 had more rain than 2000. 2000 2001 income 45,403 66,234 First change "2001" to "2002". Select the lines in Visual mode, and use: :s/2001/2002/g Now use "gv" to reselect the same text. It doesn't matter where the cursor is. Then use ":s/2000/2001/g" to make the second change. Obviously, you can repeat these changes several times. ============================================================================== 26.2 Add and subtract When repeating the change of one number into another, you often have a fixed offset. In the example above, one was added to each year. Instead of typing a substitute command for each year that appears, the CTRL-A command can be used. Using the same text as above, search for a year: /19[0-9][0-9]\|20[0-9][0-9] Now press CTRL-A. The year will be increased by one: The financial results for 2002 are better than for 2000. The income increased by 50%, even though 2001 had more rain than 2000. 2000 2001 income 45,403 66,234 Use "n" to find the next year, and press "." to repeat the CTRL-A ("." is a bit quicker to type). Repeat "n" and "." for all years that appear. Hint: set the 'hlsearch' option to see the matches you are going to change, then you can look ahead and do it faster. Adding more than one can be done by prepending the number to CTRL-A. Suppose you have this list: 1. item four 2. item five 3. item six Move the cursor to "1." and type: 3 CTRL-A The "1." will change to "4.". Again, you can use "." to repeat this on the other numbers. Another example: 006 foo bar 007 foo bar Using CTRL-A on these numbers results in: 007 foo bar 010 foo bar 7 plus one is 10? What happened here is that Vim recognized "007" as an octal number, because there is a leading zero. This notation is often used in C programs. If you do not want a number with leading zeros to be handled as octal, use this: :set nrformats-=octal The CTRL-X command does subtraction in a similar way. ============================================================================== 26.3 Making a change in many files Suppose you have a variable called "x_cnt" and you want to change it to "x_counter". This variable is used in several of your C files. You need to change it in all files. This is how you do it. Put all the relevant files in the argument list: :args *.c This finds all C files and edits the first one. Now you can perform a substitution command on all these files: :argdo %s/\<x_cnt\>/x_counter/ge | update The ":argdo" command takes an argument that is another command. That command will be executed on all files in the argument list. The "%s" substitute command that follows works on all lines. It finds the word "x_cnt" with "\<x_cnt\>". The "\<" and "\>" are used to match the whole word only, and not "px_cnt" or "x_cnt2". The flags for the substitute command include "g" to replace all occurrences of "x_cnt" in the same line. The "e" flag is used to avoid an error message when "x_cnt" does not appear in the file. Otherwise ":argdo" would abort on the first file where "x_cnt" was not found. The "|" separates two commands. The following "update" command writes the file only if