Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 22

Repeat Line-Wise Visual Commands

When we use the dot command to repeat a change made to a visual selection, it repeats the change on the same range of text. In this tip, we’ll make a change to a line-wise selection and then repeat it with the dot command.

When we execute a command from Visual mode, we are dropped back into Normal mode and the range of text that was marked out in Visual mode is unselected. So what should we do if we want to perform another Visual mode command on the same range of text?

Suppose that we had the following excerpt of malformatted Python:

visual_mode/fibonacci-malformed.py

def fib(n):
    a, b = 0, 1
    while a < n:
print a,
a, b = b, a+b
fib(42)

This code sample uses four spaces per indentation. ...