Why the dot (.) command is so useful in VIM?

vim vi
rhinoinrepose picture rhinoinrepose · Sep 6, 2011 · Viewed 15.3k times · Source

I use VIM pretty regularly now but I never use the dot (.) command to repeat the previous action. I keep reading about how awesome it is but I never see any real world examples that make sense to me and the way I code in VIM. What are some real world examples that show how awesome the dot (.) command is?

Answer

Benoit picture Benoit · Sep 6, 2011

Here are some actions that I do with the dot command:

  • Simpler than :%s/\<word\>/replacement/gc is * on the word, then cereplacement<esc> and then repeat n.. This is nice if you have two or three occurrences of your word. If you have several words that you want to replace, then go to the next word, hit * and again n.
  • When I want to left-align some blocks: <Ctrl-V>jjj<..... or insert spaces at the front: <ctrl-v>jjjI<space><esc>....
  • after dd or dw, the dot command will delete another line/word

A magical thing that happens with the dot command is that if it repeats a command that used a numbered register, it will use the next numbered register (see :help redo-register).

Explanation: If you did dd on 9 lines and want to restore them in the order in which you've deleted them, then do: "1P......... Note that registers 1 to 9 are Vim's delete-ring. "1P will insert before the cursor the last deleted text, "2P will then insert prior-to-last deleted text, and so on.

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