When you see my phone you immediately know which is my favourite text editor.

(sorry for bad quality)

I’ve been using it for years now and due to its vast number of features, I’m constantly learning something new. I’m not even sure whether you can say that you really know vim, no matter how much you study it.

Today I want to share with you the feature which I always neglected though I always knew of its existence and the one which improved my productivity when forced to do some tedious editing.

VIM recordings

VIM recording, as the name suggests, records everything you type. To start recording, press q in normal mode followed by a letter (a to z). That starts recording keystrokes to the specified register. Vim displays recording in the status line. Type any normal mode commands, or enter insert mode and type text. To stop recording, again press q while in normal mode.

Let’s see an example of how I would use this feature.

How to use it

The problem with using recordings is the fact that in order to use them successfully you have to use only the combination of commands that will yield the same result when repeated in different lines. Let’s consider the following:

You want to transform these two lines:

First name: John
Address: 5 Central Park West and Columbus

into these:

<dt class="property-name">First name:</dt><dd>John</dd>
<dt class="property-name">Address:</dt><dd>5 Central Park West and Columbus</dd>

We start on the first line with the cursor on the first character F. First steps are simple, we go into insert mode i and type in <dt class="property-name">. We exit insert mode ESC (I have this bound to jj which I recommend). The cursor now is located at >. Now we need to think how to move our cursor in a repeatable way to put </dt> after First name:. The simplest way would be to move 11 times to the left using 11l, but obviously, this is a bad choice because Address: has 8 characters and we would end up with our cursor after the word in that line. A step in the better direction would be to jump by words 3w, but Address: is one word where First name are two so again, it’s a no-go. A common characteristic of these two lines is the double-colon :, so the best course is to jump to this character f:, go one character to the right l, go to insert mode using s and type </dt><dd>. Then we can just exit insert mode jj and start typing at the end of the line A and type the closing tag </dd>. Next, we exit normal mode jj, go one line down j and go to the beginning of the line ^ and finish the recording q. The last steps are necessary if we want to be able to repeat a recording for many lines. In another case, the recording would repeat itself for the same line.

Use it with commands too

Conclusion

For less-complicated repeatable tasks, I often use . or <CTRL>-v and other visual selections when possible. It’s not often that I use VIM recordings, but when I do I’m very grateful I’m able to use them because they can prove to be a useful tool in certain cases. For me, it’s mostly when editing HTML.

So there you go! VIM recordings are awesome! Feel free to leave any suggestions for some use-cases below or if you feel I should add something in this post :)

Thanks for reading!

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