Visual selections

vim has multiple modes for working with visual selections (not to be confused with select mode gh).

• v puts you into visual mode where you select a range of characters.
• V puts you into visual line mode where you select a range of lines.
• c-v puts you into visual block mode where you select a rectangular block of characters.

Presumably you know about these, but let’s look at some less known features that you might not know about.

Switching selection type during selection

Consider you’re making a selection you started with v and you realize you really wanted to target lines instead. What do you do, re-do the selection? No, just press the key that would trigger visual line selection V. Of course, the same applies to the other modes.

Moving to other ends of the selection

Ever realized you messed up the beginning of a selection and had to re-do it? There is a better way with o, which jumps you to the other end of the selection.

Another (more obscure) thing you can do is O which jumps to the other side of the selection horizontally. This doesn’t really make a difference for v and V but will for c-v.

In this example I show this off by moving the cursor to the other side with O, diagonally across with o and then O to jump to the other side.

Multi line insert/append in visual block mode

This is a very useful feature for when you’re making similar edits on multiple lines at once. The basics of it is just to create a visual block selection and then using I or A. Here’s an example of using I.

There is a special case for appending to the end of lines, if you do $ when doing a block selection you don’t target the last character, but you target the last column of all lines. This means that using A in this scenario appends to end of lines.

Here is a slightly more involved editing task where I use this. I have the hex literal as left by the last example, but now I want to have them back as decimal but as strings.

I make a block selection around the 0x and change all of them into a '. I use gv to bring back the last visual selection, and I do :s/,// to get rid of the , for now. I again do gv to bring back the selection and now do the $ then A to insert ',.