How can I insert text at the end of a group of lines?

Question

Let's say I had a block of text...

Lorem ipsum
Lorem ipsum dolor
Lorem ipsum dolor sit
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

...and I wanted to insert a . at the end of each line. What would the best approach be to achieve this?

Answer 1

I do the following to append text to multiple lines:

• <c-V> - Enter Visual Block mode.
• Use j/k to select the lines.
• $ - Move cursor to last character.
• A - Enter insert mode after last character.
• Insert desired text.
• <Esc> - Exit insert mode and finish block append.

When compared to writing :norm after selection there are even less key presses, but the real reason why I use this is because it's more instinctive for me to work on Visual Block mode for this type of changes.

Answer 2

On first line just type: 4:norm A.

4 and : create a range for you and then norm A. adds the dot to each line

Another solution for longer paragraphs could be: Vip<C-v>$A.<Esc>

The first step is to select the paragraph with Vip then you change to visual block mode and move the cursor to the end of each line with $ then you add the . to each line with A. and got to normal mode with <Esc> to see the change be applied to each line.

Answer 3

First you can visually select them using V and then use the movement keys to select the entire text (or if the text were strictly a paragraph you could do [starting at the first line] V}). And then type :. This should bring up something like :'<,'> in the command-line.

:'<'>normal A.

This executes normal A. on the selected lines. normal A. executes A. as normal mode keystrokes. This Appends a . at the end of each of the selected lines.

Answer 4

If you want to add dot at the end of all lines:

:%norm A.

or you can use search and replace:

:%s/$/./

% is whole file, $ is end of line

Answer 5

To make it a little more general, you can record a macro on a single line, and then play it back on each line in your visually selected range.

Record a macro into a register (the q register in this example):

qqA.<Esc>q

You can then visually select the lines you want to operate on:

Vip

And then play back your macro on each line (the range will be auto-filled):

:'<,'>norm @q