Entering visual mode is selecting whole lines unexpectedly

Question

I'm editing a small bash script:

d=$1
  year=$(date -d"$d" +%Y)
  month=$(date -d "$d" +%m)
  day=$(date -d "$d" +%d)
  hive -f /home/gavin_cameron/hive_queries/dc_player_daily_snapshot.hive -d jobYear="$year" -d jobMonth="$month" -d jobDay="$day" > logs/debug_$d.log 2>&1

I'd like to delete the 2 spaces for each line for year, month, day and hive.

When I place my cursor underneath the d in d=$1 and then press v and then press right once to cover the white space on the first line and then down to highlight all the white spaces, the entire lines are highlighted whereas I was expecting just the white space to be highlighted.

Why is that and how can I delete the indentation using visual mode plus delete in a oner rather than line by line deletion?

Answer 1

While you can use visual block mode via Ctrl-V, I would suggest a re-indenting tool (since that’s your goal).

Meet =. It’s an operator. It takes motions and text objects. And it indents things.

I would do =ip from anywhere in your block of code.