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original below. I want to copy each line and paste multiple n times under their own lines separately.
USD
XYZ
ABC
YUT
LMO
.
.
. upto so on
want them to become like this. Any way how can I achieve following in Vim?
USD
USD
USD
USD
USD
XYZ
XYZ
XYZ
XYZ
XYZ
ABC
ABC
ABC
ABC
ABC
YUT
YUT
YUT
YUT
YUT
LMO
LMO
LMO
LMO
LMO
.
.
. upto so on
Here is another solution using the :g command.
You can use:
g/^/t.|t.|t.|t.
This basically means mark each line start, then run the :t (copy line) command on it. It uses the . to copy it below and then does the same again 4 times (but need to be separated by |.
The advantage of this command is, you can easily do it only for lines that match a certain pattern. So perhaps you only want to run this command for all lines that are not empty?
g/./t.|t.|t.|t.
(Empty lines would not match the . regular expression).
Or perhaps you want to copy all lines, except for comment lines (assuming those start with a #). In that case, we have to use the :g! or :v command, that runs the following command on all lines that do not match the regular expression:
v/^#/t.|t.|t.|t.
Or you want to only copy each line once:
g/^/t.
Use a tool that makes it easy:
%!awk '{ <c-r>=repeat('print;', 5)<cr> }'
Here I’m using awk with an action to print the current line multiple times, which I created by invoking vim’s repeat function and inserting into the command using the expression register.
This is scalable: you can use a range to select a subset of lines (although for a single line yy{count}p is faster), and it’s adjustable (change the repeat parameter). It is limited to systems where you have awk, though.
Alternately, with an awk-loop:
%!awk '{ for (i = 0; i < 5; ++i) print; }'
More approaches: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/81904/repeat-each-line-multiple-times
I can’t resist this very terse polyglot:
%!awk '<c-r>=repeat('1;', 5)<cr>'
for inside awk would be slightly better though, one fewer language involved, no code generation involved there?
Following is not very scalable but simple enough for smaller lists: "start recording macro: yank word, insert it in new line below and repeat last ex command n times, stop macro recording. Repeat macro on every word"
yy4p4j for the recorded part. You also say "repeat last 2 steps" but you only need to repeat the last one, which is running the macro, with @q. Also good to point out that you can repeat it with @@ and you can also use a count, such as 5@@. Unfortunately this one requires an exact count to work, you can't just use 999@@ since it won't break when it gets to the end of the file (which is sometimes useful when using a macro...)
j after stopping the macro recording. If you invert those two, then you can simply repeat the whole macro and be positioned where it should be executed next. That's very useful, because j@q is hard to type and you can't repeat it with a number, while 5@q or 5@@ to run it 5 times is an easier way to go through a file with hundreds or thousands of lines...
You can use a :substitute command matching the whole line, including the line break at the end (\n) and then use an expression in the replacement, using the repeat() function together with submatch() to interpolate the contents of the matched line.
:%s/.*\n/\=repeat(submatch(0), 5)
I am new to this as well, so my suggestion is:
In normal mode:
qa: start recording in a registryyy: copy the whole line5p: paste it 5 times (if 5 is the target number of duplication)5j: go down 5 timesq: stop recordingI would then undo changes with u, and the just do a:
150@a: if there is 150 lines you want to do the macro on
