How to repeat a command with substitution in Vim?

Question

In Unix the ^ allows you to repeat a command with some text substituted for new text. For example:

csh% grep "stuff" file1 >> Results
grep "stuff" file1
csh% ^file1^file2^
grep "stuff" file2
csh%

Is there a Vim equivalent? There are a lot of times I find myself editing minor things on the command line over and over again.

Answer 1

Specifically for subsitutions: use & to repeat your last substitution on the current line from normal mode.

To repeat for all lines, type :%&

Answer 2

q: to enter the command-line window (:help cmdwin).

You can edit and reuse previously entered ex-style commands in this window.

Answer 3

Once you hit :, you can type a couple characters and up-arrow, and it will character-match what you typed. e.g. type :set and it will climb back through your "sets". This also works for search - just type / and up-arrow. And /abc up-arrow will feed you matching search strings counterchronologically.

Answer 4

There are 2 ways.

1. You simply hit the . key to perform an exact replay of the very last command (other than movement). For example, I type cw then hello to change a word to "hello". After moving my cursor to a different word, I hit . to do it again.
2. For more advanced commands like a replace, after you have performed the substition, simply hit the : key then the ↑ up arrow key, and it fills your command line with the same command.

Answer 5

To repeat the previous substition on all lines with all of the same flags you can use the mapping g&.

Answer 6

If you have made a substitution in either normal mode :s/A/B/g (the current line) or visual mode :'<,>'s/A/B/g (lines included in the current selection) and you want to repeat that last substitution, you can:

• Move to another line (normal mode) and simply press &, or if you like, :-&-<CR> (looks like :&), to affect the current line without highlighting, or

• Highlight a range (visual mode) and press :-&-<CR> (looks like :'<,'>&) to affect the range of lines in the selection.

With my limited knowledge of Vim, this solves several problems. For one, the last visual substitution :'<,'>s/A/B/g is available as the last command (:-<UP>) from both normal and visual mode, but always produces an error from normal mode. (It still refers to the last selection from visual mode - not to the empty selection at the cursor like I assumed - and my example substitution exhausts every match in one pass.) Meanwhile, the last normal mode substitution starts with :s, not :'<,'>s, so you would need to modify it to use in visual mode. Finally, & is available directly from normal mode and so it accepts repetitions and other alternatives to selections, like 2& for the next two lines, and as user ruohola said, g& for the entire file.

In both versions, pressing : then & works as if you had pressed : and then retyped s/A/B/, so the mode you were in last time is irrelevant and only the current cursor line or selection determines the line(s) to be affected. (Note that the trailing flags like g are cleared too, but come next in this syntax too, as in :&g/: '<,'>&g. This is a mixed blessing in my opinion, as you can/must re-specify flags here, and standalone & doesn't seem to take flags at all. I must be missing something.)

I welcome suggestions and corrections. Most of this comes from experimentation just now so I'm sure there's a lot more to it, but hopefully it helps anyway.

Answer 7

Take a look at this: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_command-line_history for explanation.

Answer 8

You can type @: to repeat the last command.