Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 24

Edit Tabular Data with Visual-Block Mode

We can work with rows of text in any editor, but manipulating columns of text requires a more specialized tool. Vim provides this capability in the form of its Visual-Block mode, which we’ll use to transform a plain-text table.

Suppose that we have a plain-text table such as this one:

visual_mode/chapter-table.txt

Chapter            Page
Normal mode          15
Insert mode          31
Visual mode          44

We want to draw a vertical line out of pipe characters to separate the two columns of text and make it look more like a table. But first, we’ll reduce the spacing between the two columns, which are farther apart than they need be. We can make both of these changes using Visual-Block mode. See how in Table 5, ​Adding vertical ...