CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimcharacter
MrB
MrB

Reputation: 2225

Change the next N characters in VIM

Say I have the following line:

|add_test()          (| == cursor position)

And want to replace the 'add' with a 'del'.

del|_test()

I can either press X three times and then press i to insert and type del. What I want is something like 3c or 3r to overwrite just 3 characters. Both of these don't do what I want, 3c overwrites 3 characters with the same character, 3r does several other things.

Is there an easy way to do this without manually Xing and inserting the text?

Upvotes: 77

Views: 39652

Answers (6)

Keith Thompson
Keith Thompson

Reputation: 263277

c3  ('c', '3', space), then type the characters you want to insert. (Or you can use right-arrow or l rather than space.)

Or, as @Mike just said in a comment, R works nicely if the number of characters happens to match the number of characters you're deleting.

Or ct_ to change from the cursor to the next _ character.

Or, as @bloody suggests in a comment, 3s.

Upvotes: 8

user2162559
user2162559

Reputation: 11

The other answers given use numbers. When the text is longer it's easier to not have to count. For example I often make headlines in markdown files like:

Some super duper long title that I don't want to have to count

double the line with yy pp

Some super duper long title that I don't want to have to count Some super duper long title that I don't want to have to count

Highlighth the whole line with V then use r{char} or in this case r= to get:

Some super duper long title that I don't want to have to count ============================================================== (I added a space above to trip stack overflow's markdown formatting)

Upvotes: 1

ajk
ajk

Reputation: 1055

I think 3cl is what you want. It changes 3 characters to the right. I'd type ct_del<esc>, but that's not what you asked

Upvotes: 10

skeept
skeept

Reputation: 12413

If the works have the same length you can use the R command which replaces what you had previously with what you type.

Upvotes: 5

lumberjack
lumberjack

Reputation: 483

Use c{motion} command:

  1. cf_ - change up to the first '_' (including);
  2. ct_ - change up to the first '_' (excluding);
  3. cw - change the first word;

The word is determined by iskeyword variable. Check it with :set iskeyword? and remove any '_', like that :set iskeyword=@,48-57,192-255. By the way see :help c and :help motion if you want more.

Upvotes: 34

dash-tom-bang
dash-tom-bang

Reputation: 17853

3s, "substitute 3 characters" is the same as c3l. 3cl and c3l should be the same, I don't know why you'd see the same character repeated. I'm also a fan of using t, e.g. ct_ as another poster mentioned, then I don't have to count characters and can just type "del".

I struggled with the "replace a couple of characters" for a few days too; 'r' was great for single characters, R was great for a string of matching length, but I wanted something like the OP is asking for. So, I typed :help x and read for a while, it turns out that the description of s and S are just a couple of pages down from x.

In other words, :help is your friend. Read and learn.

Upvotes: 120

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