Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 2

Don’t Repeat Yourself

For such a common use case as appending a semicolon at the end of a series of lines, Vim provides a dedicated command that combines two steps into one.

Suppose that we have a snippet of JavaScript code like this:

the_vim_way/2_foo_bar.js

var foo = 1
var bar = 'a'
var foobar = foo + bar

We need to append a semicolon at the end of each line. Doing so involves moving our cursor to the end of the line and then switching to Insert mode to make the change. The $ command will handle the motion for us, and then we can run a;<Esc> to make the change.

To finish the job, we could run the exact same sequence of keystrokes on the next two lines, but that would be missing a trick. The dot command will repeat that ...