Friday, March 6, 2009

Copy/Paste the block of text in vi/vim

  • Mark the location of the first character of the block of text you want to copy by pressing mx
  • This marks the begining of the text to be copied into a buffer 'x'.
  • Move the cursor over the last character of the block of text you want to copy and press (shift)+x
  • By pressing shift you are moving all the characters from mark to the current position into a buffer.
  • To copy (or, in vi terminology, to yank the buffered text) press y'x
  • This will yank everything from the buffer x. ('tick' character ' is command in vi to read from the named buffer)
  • Now move the cursor above the location where you want to paste the yanked text and press p
  • p (for paste) will insert the copied (yanked) text at the line below the cursor.


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2 comments:

Peter Retief said...

why not use:
(for five lines)
:y5

move curson
p

Anonymous said...

just what i was looking for, thanks!

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