Practical Vim

Tip 20

Grok Visual Mode

Visual mode allows us to select a range of text and then operate upon it. However intuitive this might seem, Vim’s perspective on selecting text is different from other text editors.

Suppose for a minute that we’re not working with Vim but instead filling out a text area on a web page. We’ve written the word “March,” but it should read “April,” so using the mouse, we double-click the word to select it. Having highlighted the word, we could hit the backspace key to delete it and then type out the correct month as a replacement.

You probably already know that there’s no need to hit the backspace key in this example. With the word “March” selected, we would only have to type the letter “A” and it would replace the selection, ...