Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 68

Repeat a Change on Contiguous Lines

We can make light work out of repeating the same set of changes on a range of lines by recording a macro and then playing it back on each line. There are two ways to do this: executing the macro in series or in parallel.

As a demonstration, we’ll transform this snippet of text:

macros/consecutive-lines.txt

1. one
2. two
3. three
4. four

We’ll make it look like this:

1) One
2) Two
3) Three
4) Four

The task may look trivial, but it presents a couple of interesting challenges.

Record One Unit of Work

To begin, we record all changes made to the first line:

Keystrokes	Buffer Contents
qa	1. one 2. two
0f.	1. one 2. two
r)	1) one 2. two
w~	1) One 2. two
j	1) One 2. two
q	1) One ...