How to Modify Multiple Various Matches at Once in Vim
1 min readAug 26, 2024
- You need very magic mode to forget about escaping regex syntax!
- As I am in a data wrangling mode, it’s just wonderful.
- Start search with
\/v<regex> - I need to hit multiple matches.
- Often workspaces fail deployment and I need another retry.
- Say
foo,barandacmefailed. Let’s demo the whole thing
- These can be substring of comlpicated names. They are unique enough.
- You can use the
|operator to match either "sqs" or "pbs" strings using regex. Here's how you can do it:
\/vfoo|bar|acme- Wonderful, we have the match. Now we can operate.
- As Drew Neil instructed us in Practical Vim, it’s great to decouple search (/ command) and Ex command operating on the search.
- This regex pattern will match either “sqs” or “pbs” strings in Vim.
- Then you can use one of my three favorites:
:g##d— delete lines with matches:v##d— delete lines without matches:%s##<replace_string>#g— replace matches with a single<replace_string>
