Practical Vim

Chapter 4Visual Mode

Vim’s Visual mode allows us to define a selection of text and then operate upon it. This should feel pretty intuitive, since it is the model that most editing software follows. But Vim’s take is characteristically different, so we’ll start by making sure we grok Visual mode (Tip 20).

Vim has three variants of Visual mode involving working with characters, lines, or rectangular blocks of text. We’ll explore ways of switching between these modes as well as some useful tricks for modifying the bounds of a selection (Tip 21).

We’ll see that the dot command can be used to repeat Visual mode commands, but that it’s especially effective when operating on line-wise regions. When working with character-wise selections, the dot ...