How to repeat some action certain times on Vim?
Try this:
Do something
Exit to normal mode
Type, for example,
22.
The last commands will repeats 22 times.
One way to do this is to assign your key sequence to a macro, then run the macro once followed by the @@
run-last-macro command. For example:
qa.jq@a@@
If you know how many times you want to repeat the macro, you can use 4@@
or whatever.
Regarding your specific example, I prefer to do multiple-line insertion using visual block mode (accessed with Ctrl-v
). For example, if I had the following lines:
This should be a comment.
So should this.
This is definitely a comment.
Is this a comment? Yes.
I'd go to the top first character in the top line, hit Ctrl-v
to enter visual block mode, navigate to last line (maybe using 3j
to move down 3 lines, maybe using 4g
to go directly to 4th line, or maybe simply G
to go the end), then type I// <esc>
to insert the comments on all the lines at once:
// This should be a comment.
// So should this.
// This is definitely a comment.
// Is this a comment? Yes.
Also, there's a very handy commenter/un-commenter plugin that supports many languages here. It's easier than manually inserting/removing comments.
You can visually select the lines you want to repeat it on, type :normal! .
to make vim use .
on each line. Because you started with a visual selection, it ends up looking like this:
:'<,'>normal! .
However, if you're adding and removing //
comments alot, you might find the following mappings useful:
" add // comment with K
noremap K :s,^\(//\)\=,//,e <BAR> nohls<CR>j
" remove // comment with CTRL+K
noremap <C-K> :s,^//,,e <BAR> nohls<CR>j
You can use 5K
to comment 5 lines, you can use visual mode to select your lines first, or you can just hammer K
until you've commented everything you want.