Vim Tip 10 and 11 - use counts or not

Practical Vim

Vim Tip 10 - use counts to do simple arithmetic

I liked this one! Simple but powerful!

We already know that we can prefix the commands with a count, right? This tip is just to highlight that it can also be done with <c-a> and <c-x> to increment/decrement numbers.

See how beautiful it is!

Imagine this line:

.blog { background-position: 0px 0px }

And you want this:

.blog { background-position: 0px 0px }
.news { background-position: -180px -180px }

Steps to quickly achieve that:

• cursor on the first line
• yyp - copy the line and paste below, the cursor follows
• cW.news - replace .blog with .news
• 180<c-x> - yeah! this is enough to make 0 become -180! there's no need to even move the cursor!
• w. - go to the next word and repeat

Vim Tip 11 - don't count if you can repeat

Quite frequently it's faster to do a change and then repeat with dot than counting to solve things with less keystrokes.

Remember Vim Tip 4, 5 and 6 - tricks to use the Dot Formula#Vim Tip 4 - act, repeat, reverse.