Question

I am trying to select multiple lines that are not in a continuous chunk. E.g., I want to select line 1 and 3 simultaneously without selecting line 2:

 1. this is line 1 
 2. this is line 2 
 3. this is line 3

Initially I thought this would be a trivia task, but after spending quite some time googling around to no avail, I realized this might not be a simple/common task.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

---

Edit:
Thanks for the responses. I will provide a little more details on how I came up with the question.

I was trying to align a chunk code like the following, using Tabularize:

1. name1="Woof"
2. lucky_dog = lucky( "dog_one"= name1, 
3.                    "dog_two"= name1 )
4. name2="Howl"

I wanted it to align like this:

1. name1     = "Woof"
2. lucky_dog = lucky( "dog_one"= name1, 
3.                    "dog_two"= name1 )
4. name2     = "Howl"

But I cannot do so because Tabularize will take third line into consideration, and align everything into:

1.name1                        = "Woof"
2.lucky_dog                    = lucky( "dog_one"= name1,
3.                   "dog_two" = name1 )
4.name2                        = "Howl"

I believe I could think of some regex trick to archive the desired results, it just occurred to me at first that maybe I could simply select line 1,2,4 and make those align.

Then I realized this is not a easy task.

Hence the question.

Thanks for the responses!

Answer 1

It’s not possible to select different chunks of text in vim.

What you can do instead is identify a common, unique pattern that is shared by the lines you want to act on and use the ‘global’ ex-command or ‘g’ to do it like so:

:g/shared unique pattern/ex or normal command here

For example to copy the lines to a register, say the ‘a’ register:

:g/shared unique pattern/normal "Ayy

To paste them hit “ap

The capital A that comes before yy tells vim that you want to copy and append the lines to the a register.

Like sydill said if you can tell us what exactly you want to do with the lines then we can better help you.