Animated GIFs about basic RegEx in Vim and Emacs

A non-preface about RegEx

In my little experience as a LaTeX writer using Vim and Emacs, I sometimes use the extraordinary efficiency of RegEx, also known as RegExp or “Regular Expressions”.

Vim and Emacs, provide built-in support for RegEx.

I’ll show you in the following clips some elementary uses of regex in both editors.

The software developer community will smile, but the following animated GIFs are intended for writers, not computer programmers.

Vim and RegEx

You can use RegEx in Vim by invoking the command line followed by a pattern like this one:

:(range)s/something/something_else/options

Here’s a GIF with a RegEx basic pattern: in the following example in which you can see a phrase containing two words dolor. I’m going to replace both dolor in gaudium.

It worked, but only the first dolor was changed into gaudium!

To obtain the modification of all occurrences, add the g option at the end:

Now every dolor is changed into gaudium: target reached.

Emacs and RegEx(p)

Emacs can emulate Vim flavor by using the Evil-mode.

In this scenario also RegEx searches are similar to those of original Vim.

In the real Emacs, however, you can invoke RegEx by typing M-x{.markup–code .markup–p-code} followed by the functionreplace-regex{.markup–code .markup–p-code}.

The RegEx pattern for Emacs, in the same previous situation, is the following one:

M-x replace-regexp RET dolor RET gaudium RET{.markup–code .markup–p-code}

In the GIF below you can see a running example of the same RegEx as above seen with Vim:

In Emacs, all the occurrences are changed by default.

Soon, perhaps, other GIFs animations (GIFs recorded by Peek running under Arch Linux).

Originally published at Medium