Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 26

Append After a Ragged Visual Block

Visual-Block mode is great for operating on rectangular chunks of code such as lines and columns, but it’s not confined to rectangular regions of text.

We’ve already met this snippet of JavaScript:

the_vim_way/2_foo_bar.js

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

Three consecutive lines, each of different length. We want to append a semicolon at the end of each. In Tip 2, we solved this problem using the dot command, but we could just as well use Visual-Block mode:

Keystrokes	Buffer Contents
{start} Normal mode	var foo = 1 var bar = 'a' var foobar = foo + bar
<C-v>jj$ Visual-Block	var foo = 1 var bar = ’a’ var foobar = foo + bar
A; Insert mode	var foo = 1;  var bar ...