Vim - Delete column
One of the great advantages of Vim over other editors is that it has various visual modes that allow editing text blocks involving multiple lines.
Today I needed to delete the characters from column 5 to column 10 of a file that were between lines 20 and 30.
An alternative would be to use regular expressions, but in Vim, this can be done in a much less complex way.
Vim has several visual modes:
v
:--VISUAL--
V
:--VISUAL LINE--
<C-v>
:--VISUAL BLOCK--
The latter was the solution to my problem.
- Just go to line 20 column 5 (start of the block)
- Type
ctrl+v
- Type 10 (number of lines in the block)
- Using the
l
key or the arrow keys, select up to column 10 (end of the block) - Delete the block using the
d
command.