Mastering Vim

Interacting with Vim

The execute command lets you parse and execute a string as a Vim command. For example, the two following statements will produce equivalent results:

echo animal . ' says hello'execute 'echo animal ''says hello'''

Quotes around are needed as otherwise this command would :echo the contents of each variable (cat, says, hello). If there are no variables, an error occurs.

You can use normal to execute keys just like the user would in normal mode. For instance, if you wanted to search for a word cat and delete it, you could do this:

normal /cat<cr>dw

<cr> here needs to be typed with Ctrl + v, followed by the Enter key. However, execute "normal /cat<cr>dw" would use the literal string <cr> to represent Enter key press. Just ...