Practical Vim

Tip 29

Duplicate or Move Lines Using ‘:t’ and ‘:m’ Commands

The :copy command (and its shorthand :t) lets us duplicate one or more lines from one part of the document to another, while the :move command lets us place them somewhere else in the document.

For demonstration purposes, we’ll use this shopping list:

Line 1 
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 

Duplicate Lines with the ‘:t’ Command

Our shopping list is incomplete: we also need to buy nails at the hardware store. To fix the list, we’ll reuse the last line of the file, creating a copy of it below “Hardware Store.” We can easily do so using the :copy Ex command:

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