joerg van den hoff wrote: > rarely using rectangular regions (and when, then for deletion), so > I was surprised by the following: > > issuing something like > > c^Aqjq > > to select a rectangle with a width of one character and a height of > 2 lines and trying to replace the rectangle by a multicharacter > string fails. only the first character of the replacement string > specified in response to the "Rectangular text:" query is inserted. > > e.g. with an input of > > 1 2 3 > 1 2 3 > > and selecting the 2nd column as rectangle and trying to replace the > 2s by "abc" results in > > 1 a 3 > 1 a 3 > > I would have expected the text to the right of the rectangle to be > shifted to the right to make room for the full replacement string? > > questions: > > * am I doing it wrong?
I'm afraid not. This is the current behavior. > > * if no, is this to be expected behaviour or a bug? > > * if not a bug, is there a canonical way to achieve the desired > * edit result, i.e. > > 1 abc 3 > 1 abc 3 No easy way. I find myself using ^A-r to open a rectangle with the right amount of space (and it's usually too much :-/ ), then put in the text I want, then delete the extra, if any. I don't know how hard it would be internally to force the new empty space in order to make room for the new string. Currently if the new text is shorter than the rectangle width, it's padded with spaces -- to be consistent, the rectangle should probably be shrunk to match the string length. I seem to recall I wasn't terribly happy with the way the rectangular operations turned out, after implementing them, and I think this was part of it. paul > > in this example? > > thank you > joerg > =---------------------- paul fox, p...@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma)