Search and replace, special pattern for indent (ex: newline = '\r')

Question

I am cleaning up some minified css. I found this article helpful for adding a newline before/after a search match. This SO thread has a pretty exhaustive list of ways to indent with VIM, but it DOES NOT include a command-line pattern that will indent, like \r for ading a newline.
The answers in this SO thread rely on surrounding formatting with the ]p pattern or using macros, neither of which serve my purposes.

Here's my command to add a new line before and two new lines after all matches for }:

:/[}]

then

:%s//\r&\r\r/g

I do something similar for {. However, for all matches to ; I need to add a \r (newline) and indent a determined number of spaces. I don't want to rely on vim's auto indent settings. I want to indent a number of times that i set manually in the command string.

Answer 1

Two ways of doing this sort of thing are:

With a :substitute command

:%s/\(foo\)/\r    \1/g

This will add a newline and four spaces of "indent" before every matched foo

The \( and \) around the search expression /foo/ capture the match into a group, and then the \1 uses the captured group in the replacement. This obviously isn't necessary for simple values of /foo/.

With a :global command

You can also do this with the :normal and :global commands. For example the following command will indent all lines that match the regexp /foo/ and add a line above them:

:g/foo/normal >>O

This works similar to a :substitute command, but instead of making a substitution, it applies the normal mode operations indent (>>) followed by add a line above (O) to each matching line.

You can adjust the normal mode commands to perform different operations as necessary.

For more details:

:help :global
:help :normal

Using :s and :g to Unminify CSS

I'm a little unclear on precisely what you're trying to achieve, but if the goal is to e.g. turn this:

margin:0;padding:0;font-family:verdana;

into this:

    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    font-family:verdana;

^^^^ <- one level of indent

I'd do so with the following two commands:

:%s/;/;\r/g
:g/;/normal >>

If, for some reason, you need to add a specific number of spaces that doesn't match your shiftwidth settings, you could instead do:

:%s/;/;\r/g
:g/;/normal i    
             ^^^^ <- type four spaces after the `i`

Macros

In practice, for the specific case mentioned above, I'd probably have used a recursive macro:

• qqq: Clear out the q register. Necessary for recursive macros,
• qq: Start recording in the q register,
• /;[^$]<cr>: Find the first semi-colon not followed by a newline,
• :left<cr>: Remove any existing indentation (to remove automatic indentation),
• >>: Add one level of indent,
• na<cr><esc>: Jump back to the semi-colon,
• @q: Recurse,
• q: Finish recording,
• @q: Run the macro.

You could also record a macro that runs on a single line and then apply it to every line with the global command.

qqqqq:left<cr>>>f;a<cr><esc>@qq@q
:g/;/norm @q

The macro versions look complicated written down, but because they just use normal editing commands recording them comes naturally (with a bit of practice) and using them is a lot faster than it looks.