Practical Vim

Tip 21

Define a Visual Selection

Visual mode’s three submodes deal with different kinds of text. In this tip, we’ll look at the ways of enabling each visual submode, as well as how to switch between them.

Vim has three kinds of Visual mode. In character-wise Visual mode, we can select anything from a single character up to a range of characters within a line or spanning multiple lines. This is suitable for working at the level of individual words or phrases. If we want to operate on entire lines, we can use line-wise Visual mode instead. Finally, block-wise Visual mode allows us to work with columnar regions of the document. Block-wise Visual mode is quite special, so we’ll discuss it at greater length in Tip 24, Tip 25, and Tip 26.

Enabling ...