All too often, I find myself redoing a command over and over. I've often said, there must be a better way to do this. And there is! While writing some automation scripts in an agile "paired-programming" method yesterday, I learned a few neat tricks for VI from my programming partner. I'll share them in the next few posts.

The first is repeating a command. If, for example, you want to delete 100 lines from your file in VIM. Pressing the "d" key twice deletes a single line. So I used to just keep typing dd 100 times till everything I want was deleted. If you know how many times you want to run the command, you just type the number first, then the command.

100dd

Typing the above in VIM will repeat the single line delete (dd) command 100 times. How else can it be used? It can even insert text repeatedly! Type the following:

50iTHE END IS NEAR<escape><escape>

The 50i tells VIM that you are going to insert some text that you want repeated 50 times. The text "THE END IS NEAR" is what will be repeated. And pressing the escape key twice implements it. You would get:

THE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEARTHE END IS NEAR

Notice it is all one line. In order to make it appear on multiple lines, just press the enter key and then end of the text, before the escape. Very simple.

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