How do I repeat the last n changes in Vim?

Question

Doing . repeats the last change. Doing 2. repeats the last change two times.

But imagine I want to repeat the change before the last one. How do I do it in Vim?

Answer 1

Record Your "Edits"

yes! you can do this in vim! 😎

One of Vim's most useful features is its ability to record what you type for later playback. This is most useful for repeated jobs that cannot easily be done with .

To start recording

• press q in normal mode followed by a letter (a to z)
  • That starts recording keystrokes to the specified register. Vim displays recording in the status line
  • Type any normal mode commands, or enter insert mode and type text

To stop recording

• ending in normal mode, come to normal mode if you are not, and press q
• ending in insert mode, press Ctrl+O, this will temporarily get you into normal mode, and then press q

To playback your keystrokes/recording

• press @ followed by the letter previously chosen
• Typing @@ repeats the last playback

References

• Vim Fandom: Recording keys for repeated jobs
• Vim Fandom: Macros
• Quora - How do you stop recording a Vim macro when in insert mode?

Answer 2

Based on Fredrick Phil's answer, here is an example:

Recording your macro

The following shows how to record a macro to delete everything in and including a quoted string and store in register d. The command to delete a string is da". So to store this command in macro register d we can simply do this:

qdda"q

Notice it starts and ends with a q. The second character is the register, in this case d for delete. But we could have given it any letter or number. The remaining characters da" is our command.

Using our macro

Now that our macro is recorded we can invoke it by using the @ symbol followed by the register:

@d

Repeating the last macro command

To use the most recently invoked macro command again:

@@

Unrelated info:

In this example, we used da" which stands for delete a quoted string. (If you instead wanted to delete everything inside the quoted string, but not the quotation marks themselves you can instead use di" instead.).

Answer 3

I wrote the RepeatLast.vim plugin to address this exact requirement. It provides a 5\. key binding to repeat the last 5 changes (including movements) and 2\D to drop/forget the last 2 actions.

It works by enabling macro recording all the time, which may not be desirable for everyone. But if you can live with that, it works in 99% of use cases.

Latest version: https://github.com/joeytwiddle/RepeatLast.vim (Please feedback!)

Caveats:

Please :set ch=2 so that the first line of output won't be hidden by the "recording" message.

The 1% of times it fails to work as intended are usually due to:

1. Difficulties triggering the CursorHold event slowly without losing fast-repeated keystrokes
2. Undesirable recording of [Space] and [Enter] keys when the user is responding to a prompt.

Training your q muscle to pre-emptively record macros might be a better approach in the long term. ;-)

Answer 4

Don't think you can, see :help . However, what you can do is to record a macro for your edits, you have a lot of registers to choose from {0-9a-zA-Z"} (uppercase to append). Then use e.g. @u for edit 1, @t for edit 2 and so on.

Great tips about recording from Best of VIM Tips

" Recording (BEST TIP of ALL)
qq  # record to q
your complex series of commands
q   # end recording
@q to execute
@@ to Repeat
5@@ to Repeat 5 times
qQ@qq                             : Make an existing recording q recursive *N*
" editing a register/recording
"qp                               :display contents of register q (normal mode)
<ctrl-R>q                         :display contents of register q (insert mode)
" you can now see recording contents, edit as required
"qdd                              :put changed contacts back into q
@q                                :execute recording/register q

Have a look at these for more hints for repeating:

:&     last substitute
:%&    last substitute every line
:%&gic last substitute every line confirm
g%     normal mode repeat last substitute
g&     last substitute on all lines
@@     last recording
@:     last command-mode command
:!!    last :! command
:~     last substitute
:help repeating