September 24, 2022

Vim: study on transposing lists of names from horizontal to vertical

Primary purpose of the study.

Initial status: series of inline names, separated by a semicolon followed by a space.
Objective: Transpose all names into one column by removing both semicolons and spaces.
Purpose: Creating list for mail-merging with e-mail client (Thunderbird).
Tools: Vim and built-in RegEx function.
Example:

Secondary goal

To test the integration between Markdown and css tags.

September 20, 2022

Vim: replace text in all opened buffers with only one command

Vim: do you need to replace some text in all opened buffers?

Do You need to perform a substitution between two words or text fragments in all opened buffers?

The first option is to open all the buffers and perform a search with substitution in each of them.

The search and replace string will look like the one below, where foo will be the data element to be replaced and bar will be the replaced data element.

September 12, 2022

Comparison of Vim and Emacs for a substitution operation using regular expressions

Preface

This article is a summary of two previous posts that you can read at these pages:

The topic of “regular expressions” in Vim and Emacs is well suited for a functional comparison across the four different scenarios covered in the above articles to which I refer for a description of the syntax.

September 5, 2022

Emacs: Study on constructing Regular Expressions to delete or reduce blank lines

After writing an article focusing on “Vim: Study on constructing Regular Expressions to delete or reduce blank lines with Global Command” I tried to match with a similar operation with Emacs.

The goal is to study the differences in syntax related to “regular expressions” between two writing systems.

The following is the result of my attempts after various searches on the net.

Removing blank lines in Emacs using RegExp

First of all, it may be useful to display the blank lines in the document.

August 15, 2022

Vim: Study on constructing Regular Expressions to delete or reduce blank lines with Global Command

Preface

On the topic of this article you may find interesting the following one: “Vim and Regular Expressions for removing redundant whitespace”.

Unlike the previous article, here the presence of whitespace causes different solutions than blank lines regardless of the number of their occurrences.

The study in this article is focused on both the analysis of “regular expressions” and Vim’s global command.

Vim and the Global Command

The Global Command in Vim is the g key.

August 5, 2022

What is intended by "line" in Vim? How to configure a dual alternate mode of movement between lines?

Why is the Vim line definition “special”?

In Vim a “line” is a set of characters that ends with a return line.

Is that all?

It seems obvious, but how does it differ from the definition of “line” in other writing systems?

Simple: in other environments usually “lines” break at the right margin of the monitor. In Vim they don’t.

Nothing changes for short lines, that is, lines that do not exceed the margin right margin.