How To Select All Content In Vim Editor

Finding all content within an editor can be tricky, especially if you are not use to using your editing software as a tool for editing. Many editors have an option to select everything, but some do not! This article will go over how to find and edit every piece of content in VIM (the most popular text editor).

Using VIM means there is a lot of power behind it. Most people learn the basic commands first such as creating new files or folders, moving around windows, etc. Once these basics are mastered, then advanced features come more naturally.

Vim has many powerful commands that allow you to perform almost any task quickly and efficiently. One of those tricks is being able to identify what type of content exists in the file or folder you open up.

This article will focus mostly on doing this with images, videos, documents, and presentation slides. By knowing which element types exist, you will know how to easily remove them all so you can start from scratch. Make sure to check out our other image editing articles here and here.

Removing unneeded elements can save you time later when altering or copying something. For example, if you want to copy and paste just the slide template, you don’t need the rest of the graphics and content used for the presentation!

There may also be copyright issues involved depending on the material.

Press CTRL+A

Another way to select all content is by using the Ctrl + A keyboard combination. This method works similarly to how you create an automatic edit mode with your computer software, like Photoshop or Microsoft Word.

You press Ctrl + A to enter “insertion mode” for the text tool that has been selected. Then, you can start typing away!

The only difference here is that this technique applies it to the textual editor instead of another app. Once everything is done, simply type out or drag out what you want and delete it (or use shift+backspace) to remove it.

Start selecting content

When starting to edit your document, you can choose where to begin editing! There are several ways to do this depending on what type of content you want to select.

For example, if you just wanted to make some edits to all paragraphs then start with that first. Simply press down arrow until all open spaces contain only one element (a paragraph). Then, use left or right arrows to move around the cursor within the paragraph field.

If you instead wanted to edit everything in your document except for one word, place the cursor before that word and use delete key to remove it. Press escape when done to exit out.

Both of these work because they look at either the whole thing, or nothing but one part.

Use the mouse to click and drag selection boxes

Another way to select content is by using your mouse as a tool. You can use either of your hands’s buttons or a device like a touch screen to perform this action.

By holding down the Ctrl key and clicking with one of your fingers, you can create a box around any area of the document. Then, press Enter (or V) to apply the selected contents.

You can do the same thing by pressing Shift and left-click/right-drag, which creates an exact copy of the current selection.

These are very helpful when editing large documents, files that have several sections or different style formats. For example, let’s say you want to edit some bold text in the middle of a chapter.

With the shift click method, you could just take out only the bold part instead of the whole sentence, making it more precise.

Record your macros using vim's recording feature

Recording is an excellent way to learn how to use any tool more quickly. You can create a new session, add content to be recorded, and then play back the recordings later!

Using a software program like Vyprvte or NeoVim, you can easily record all actions performed within the editor. For example, let’s say you want to select every word in the document. With this technique, you simply choose “Word selection” under the Tool category, input the word you would like to include into the search field, and press record.

After it has been pressed, you will see that the cursor position is updated with the selected text. Now you can replay the macro many times while slowly altering the words until they are all selected.

You can also combine different tools together into one sequence. For instance, if you wanted to perform bolding and italicizing on some text, you could do so by creating a separate recording for each action, then replaying them sequentially.

Practice! Practice! Practice!

Now that you have your vim editor set up, it is time to start practicing! There are many ways to learn how to use this tool efficiently. Some of the things you can do include editing whole documents or even small edits such as changing one word or adding a new sentence.

There are several great resources available online and through apps for beginner level users. Many of these focus more on teaching you the basics, and then some way to quickly edit large amounts of content.

The best approach will depend on what type of editing you want to learn and how much experience you already have with editors.

Read through everything before you start editing

Sometimes, instead of just going into all-out editor mode like we discussed earlier, some users will choose to do something more casual. They will pick one file or folder at a time to edit by opening it in your selected text editor and then reading whatever content they want to add or modify.

This can be done easily in VIM!

By using the excellent feature that almost every major text editor has these days, “quick navigation”, you can quickly go from anywhere in the document to any other section, subsection, or even sentence.

You can also use this feature to quickly get to another part of the same page or new page. This is very helpful if you are looking for anything specific such as an example, image, or bullet point.

These features work via waypoints. A waypoint is simply like a bookmark, only it comes with you and doesn't require internet connectivity. Waypoints donut files, folders, and pages together so it is very easy to lose track of what waypoint corresponds to what.

That's why there is an option to create quick navigation menus directly out of the main menu in most editors. You can name them whatever you'd like and organize them how you would like too! The best way to learn how to use these tools effectively is by experimenting and practicing.

Know the location of each piece of content

When editing text, knowing where different pieces of content are can help you quickly access them. For example, if you want to edit the word ‘Hello’, then you would know that it is preceded by a capital letter and followed by an end-of-sentence punctuation mark.

Knowing this makes it easy to locate the word since you already have information about the starting position and the ending position.

The same goes for using commands such as d, which deletes one character or w, which finds the next instance of the searched-for word.

By having this knowledge, your work will go much more smoothly. It will also be faster because you will not need to search through the whole document to find what you want!

There are several ways to do this in vim. The easiest way is to use the visual mode. Let us look at some examples.

Example 1 – Using the forward slash (/) operator

To visually select all instances of the word “dog”, type /dog. Then press enter to execute the command.

This works similarly to how we used backslash () to start a new sentence earlier.

In both cases, the cursor moves down one space and types out the selected word. In our case, it types out “dogn����”.

You can repeat this process as many times as needed until the entire content has been modified.

Focus only on picking up relevant pieces of content

Beyond just choosing an active voice or passive voice, another way to select all content is by using the common neutral tone that most people use when talking.

This means choosing “I” and “me” over your own personal pronouns such as “my” and “mine.” It also means avoiding too many examples or cases where you feel like speaking more passionately or negatively about something.

Instead, choose an argument that is not overtly political or moralistic.