Question

Background:

There are a lot of great tutorials and “tricks” pages for Vim, but one thing that is very difficult is to find specific instructions on how to do some arbitrary thing that one can easily do in one’s own familiar text editor IDE. Therefore I am asking for step by step instructions on how you I would do something in Vim that I already know how to do in other text editors. I like Vim and the great built-in help and numerous on-line tutorials, but sometimes a human has to break down and ask another human.

Question:

Suppose I have the following code in my file, how can I use Vim to get from BEFORE, to AFTER?

  BEFORE:
  Lorem ipsum dolor |  sit amet, consectetur | adipisicing elit,
  sed do eiusmod | tempor incididunt | ut 
  labore et | dolore magna aliqua. | Ut enim ad minim veniam,
  quis nostrud | exercitation ullamco | laboris 
  nisi ut | aliquip ex ea commodo | consequat. Duis aute irure

  AFTER:
  Lorem ipsum dolor  |  sit amet, consectetur   |  adipisicing elit,         
  sed do eiusmod     |  tempor incididunt       |  ut                        
  labore et          |  dolore magna aliqua.    |  Ut enim ad minim veniam,  
  quis nostrud       |  exercitation ullamco    |  laboris                   
  nisi ut            |  aliquip ex ea commodo   |  consequat. Duis aute irure

Notes:

• It would be nice to do this based on any arbitrary delimiter, not just the pipe
  character.

• If you have not found a way to do it, but you know of a plug-in, that helps, but preference goes to someone who has a working solution that they have used before

Answer 1

If you use the Align plugin, you could simply:

1. Visually select the text with V
2. Type :Align |

Where | is any delimiter

OR

1. Visually select the text with V
2. Type \t|

For a preset | shortcut.