Hacker News Reader

Comment by isostatic | Hacker News Reader

I've used vim for a couple of decades, but never pushed to many advanced features. For your example above I'd do :%s/^/"/ and :%s/$/",/

Unless I use a feature regularly I find it's a higher cognative load. I use bash, sed and perl regexps on a near daily basis. Macros are very rare.

View on HN

For that same example, you can accomplish the job in one substitute command:

    :%s/.*/"&",/

The & special character gets replaced with the whole matched pattern.

How do you escape the & character? I have been bit by this (not escaping &) a few times but never enough to have found the answer.

The same way you escape anything - with a \. E.g. if you wanted to substitute the character x with the sequence &/\ you would type

:s/x/\&\/\\

Likewise - with visual mode it's normally pretty quick to select an area and do a basic regex, even for things like re-indentation (auto-completes to something like :'<,'>s/^/\t/) even though I'm sure there's a 'proper' way to do that

> for indent, < for un-indent

Reply on news.ycombinator.com