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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T06:47:26+00:00

Is it possible to add certain lines to a visual selection via an EX-mode

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Is it possible to add certain lines to a visual selection via an EX-mode command?

I have text in the following form:

+----------+-----------+
| Some text| other text|
+----------+-----------+
| More text||
| And even more ||
| - ...||
+----------+-----------+

And I want the text to be displayed like this:

+---------------+------------+
| Some text     | other text |
+---------------+------------+
| More text     |            |
| And even more |            |
| - ...         |            |
+---------------+------------+

Using the tabular plugin when I delete the lines with + via the following workflow works:

g!/+/d
// Visually select the remaining lines
Tab /|
// Manually insert the +----+----+ lines

I was wondering if there is a way to keep the delimiting lines and visual-select the lines not containing a + via EX-Mode like :g!/+/ add-line-to-visual-selection.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could use:

    :Tab /|\|+/l1
:<range>g/+/s/ /-/g

    You can find help for \| in :help /\| or more globally :help pattern, it is the standard way to express alternation in Vim Regular Expressions. So /|\|+/ is a pattern with delimiters that matches either | or +. (Reading the whole :help pattern has excellent return on investment, FYI).

    Concerning the /l1 in the Tabular plugin, you can read the help of the plugin more in depth, it will add space after separator and left-align text.

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