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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing that he asserts "blockwise selection mode. Extremely powerful and available in very few other editors".

Blockwise selection mode is available in almost every Windows editor I use - from the Delphi IDE, Visual Studio, even to Notepad2, Shift+Alt does block selection, or alternatively Alt + mouse selection.

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I'm not familiar with most Windows editors, but — at least on OS X — although blockwise selection is available in most editors, blockwise insertion like vim has is usually left out.

E.g., in vim say I have a list like this that I wanted to append a period to on each line (a simple example, but you can see its uses):

    foo
    bar
    baz

I would just type block-wise select it (<c-v>$jj) and then type A.<esc>

I use this feature all the time.

Wow, I had no idea you could bulk-insert that easily! Thanks for sharing

plus I still have to see a use for it. Usually I just go linewise or, inside a line, with movements like f) or $.

It's mostly useful for ASCII diagrams, in conjunction with overwrite mode.

. . . or source code formatting, or adding comment characters to multiple lines, or in any other way making an identical change to several adjacent lines at the same time.

You can use it to block indent/unindent code, I find that quite useful.

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