Practical Vim

Tip 6

Meet the Dot Formula

We’ve considered three simple editing tasks so far. Even though each problem was different, we found a solution using the dot command for each one. In this tip, we’ll compare each solution and identify a common pattern—an optimal editing strategy that I call the Dot Formula.

Reviewing Three Dot-Command Editing Tasks

In Tip 2, we wanted to append a semicolon at the end of a sequence of lines. We changed the first line by invoking A;<Esc>, which set us up so that we could use the dot command to repeat the change on each subsequent line. We could move between lines using the j command, and the remaining changes could be completed simply by pressing j. as many times as necessary.

In Tip 3, we wanted to pad each occurrence ...