vim Visual ModeI’ve been using vi and vim for over 20 years at this point and not
once have I ever needed “visual mode” (a term that confuses people
because vi literally standards for “visual mode” of ex). And now
that I am finally starting to use vim’s ip and ap stuff (and the
like) I don’t need visual mode even more.
The secret is no secret, use vi as God intended, with shell
integration. Instead of using visual mode to comment things use s,^,#
, and the like. And if that is too much, write a couple cmt and
ucmt scripts like these and use them with !{ (in vi) and !ip in
vim which send the current paragraph to the filter scripts you have
created.
Here’s cmt:
#!/bin/sh
IFS=
while read -r line; do
echo "${1-#} $line"
done
And here’s ucmt:
#!/bin/sh
while read -r line; do
echo "${line#* }"
done
These scripts can be used to all sorts of things besides just commenting
and uncommenting. You can also repeat them with dot (.) to dedent a
section quickly by one space at a time (but <ip and >ip do that in
vim so only valuable if you only have vi).