Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 96

Swap Two or More Words

We can devise a substitute command that swaps all occurrences of one word with another and vice versa by using the expression register and a Vim script dictionary.

Take this excerpt:

substitution/who-bites.txt

The dog bit the man.

Suppose that we want to swap the order of the words “dog” and “man.” We could, of course, use a succession of yank and put operations, as demonstrated in ​Swap Two Words​. But let’s consider how we would go about doing this with the substitute command.

Here’s a naïve attempt at a solution:

:%s/dog/man/g
:%s/man/dog/g

The first command replaces the word “dog” with “man,” leaving us with the phrase “the man bit the man.” Then the second command replaces both occurrences ...