shortcut for ex ranges
Efraim Yawitz
After reading the thread on asynchronous processes I was just looking
at the help for the ! command which I rarely use, and after playing
with it I realized that it translates a motion from normal mode into a
range for an ex command, i.e. doing !2j gives you an ex command line
of :.,+2! to start your filter with. This made me wonder: Is there a
way to do this without the filter? In other words, instead of having
to type :.,+2s I could get there with a 2j combined with something. I
realize I can do it with the ! itself by just backspacing over the !
at the end of the ex command, but is there a more 'official' way to do
this?
Thanks,
Ephraim
Andy Wokula
No, there isn't.
But in your example, you know the number of lines you want to get in
your range, so you can type
3:
to get
:.,.+2
In general:
!2j has the form {operator}{motion}
:h operator
You can create a custom operator (and name it e.g. "g:") with
:h g@
Once it has been done here (from Jan 2008, see the whole discussion)
http://groups.google.com/group/vim_dev/msg/c6fb56645c188244
The details are somewhat tricky (if this reads better than ugly ...).
--
Andy
Efraim Yawitz
> But in your example, you know the number of lines you want to get in
> your range, so you can type
> 3:
> to get
> :.,.+2
>
That's pretty much what I was looking for. Where is it documented
that you can give a count to ':' ?