Vim Tips: Increment a List to Be Ascending

TLDR;

Visual Select rows to increase then press g<C-a>

Long version;

Vim is very powerful and can easily bent to your will.

Say you have something with a number that you need to duplicate, and increment.

1 sheep

Let's quickly make 4 duplicates.

Now we have.

1 sheep
1 sheep
1 sheep
1 sheep
1 sheep

Use Visual-Block and select the last 4 1's, and press g<C-a>.

Whoa! What just happened? From a previous post, I mentioned that <C-a> and <C-x> incremented & decremented the number under the cursor.

The g command means globally, and in this case also execute our increment one extra time on each subsequent line.

This works if we want to increase by 5 also. We'll just use the command 5g<C-a>.

Let's not forget that we also have <C-x>.

ALSO, this command can be repeatable with .

Now go out, and show off your new party trick.