Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 25

Change Columns of Text

We can use Visual-Block mode to insert text into several lines of text simultaneously.

Visual-Block mode is not just useful to us when working with tabular data. Oftentimes, we can benefit from this feature when working with code. For example, take this snippet of (suboptimal) CSS:

visual_mode/sprite.css

li.one   a{ background-image: url('/images/sprite.png'); }
li.two   a{ background-image: url('/images/sprite.png'); }
li.three a{ background-image: url('/images/sprite.png'); }

Suppose that the sprite.png file has been moved from images/ into a components/ directory. We’ll need to change each of these lines to reference the file’s new location. We could do this using Visual-Block mode as shown in Table ...