I live on the command-line, and a huge chunk of that time is spent in Vim. Well,
Neovim, actually. I do everything from writing code, to writing for my blog, as
well as other prose that I have in the works.
One thing that comes up pretty regularly, thanks to one of my projects, is the
need to increment and decrement numbers. Usually just by +1/-1 but sometimes a
bit more or less.
While it doesn’t take much to change a bit of text, that only really works if
you’re inserting the same value for every line. Take for example:
1
2
3
If I wanted to change 1 to 2, 2 to 3 and 3 to 4, I would have to go through each
line individually and change the text.
No thank you.
With Vim, you can use Ctrl+A to increment (add to) the number under the
cursor, and Ctrl+X to decrement it (subtract from).
Select all of the lines, or the numbers themselves, and hit the hotkey for the
direction / math you’d like to apply.
Want to add or subtract more than one? Like most Vim commands, you can tap a
number before the command to apply it X number of times.
To increment by five, select the numbers, tap 5 and then Ctrl+A and you’re
good to go!
