Vim 101: Repeating Commands

by Alex Young

Most types of commands can be repeated in Vim. Mastering the basic ways to repeat commands is a good way of building up your skills to prepare for another killer feature: macros.

First, the most commonly used repeat command is probably n. In Normal mode search for text with /, then press n to repeat the search. N will do this in reverse.

The substitute (:s) command can also be repeated by typing &. However, if you just want to see what the change will do at each match, then it can often be more efficient to use the c flag with a global substitution, like this:

:%s/example/Example/gc

Vim will prompt for confirmation and highlight the match, so it's easy to see if the change is what was intended.

Typing . will repeat the last text changing command. This can be useful when programming -- I find myself using it when I want to append a method call in an unpredictable pattern.

In this example, I want to add .html_safe to certain places in the file. I've typed it once already, pressed <Esc>, then used various motion commands to move to other locations where I want to append .html_safe. This example was inspired by a week of painful Ruby on Rails 2 to 3 upgrades, where I found myself using Vim's macros to perform huge amounts of editing with little effort -- I'll write about macros soon in this series.

All of these commands work with counts as well, so typing 2. will perform a text change twice.

There are more ways to repeat various operations in Vim, but before I start getting too deep for a beginner's introduction, I'll leave you with one more. Typing @: in Normal mode will repeat the last command-line. That means anything you've typed starting with : can be repeated very easily.