3

Background

I am new to vi/vim world and finished running the vimtutor several times.

The setup

In the tutorial we learn several items to correct or edit lines of text.

  • r to replace the letter the cursor is over
  • i, a, A to jump into insert mode
  • ce, c2w, c<#><cmd>, etc - will delete the <#> and enter insert mode.

The question

Is their a way to use r to specific a number of characters to replace?

Similar to c I am looking for something like 2r to replace the next 2 characters. Is this possible? Is their a way to do this with c that I just haven't figured out yet?

danielson317
  • 133
  • 4
  • You can use r in visual mode to replace highlighted characters. So <ctrl-v>2Erx would replace all characters of the current and next word (including space in between) with x. – Rolf Nov 01 '19 at 13:21

1 Answers1

8

There are 3 slightly different ways to do this.

  • R will enter "Replace mode". This is like insert mode except each character overwrites the character currently under the cursor. For example

    testing
^ Cursor here

    and pressing Rrunn<esc> will change the text to 

    running
   ^ Cursor here

  • Using c. For example, if you want to change 2 characters, you could do 2cl or c2l to delete two characters and enter insert mode. You could also use 2s as s is a synonym for cl

  • The r command can take a count, but this will only work if you want to use the same character. For example, if I have 3 double quotes, and I want to change them to 3 single quotes, I could put the cursor on the first one and type 3r'. Note that R also takes a count. If you typed 3Rabc<esc> it will replace the next 9 characters with abcabcabc.

DJMcMayhem
  • 17,581
  • 5
  • 53
  • 85
  • ‘l’ seems to be what I was looking for. Thank you for the reply. And ‘s’ looks like a powerful command to start experimenting with. – danielson317 Oct 30 '19 at 20:20
  • @daniel Glad I could help! s is very powerful indeed. Note that S is a synonym for cc – DJMcMayhem Oct 30 '19 at 20:22