I have to correct some datafiles, and I need to paste a column
in the middle of my text file to replace the older column
which contain bad values.
How can I do that ?
[cut]
Hope I have been clear enough,
Yes, that is fairly clear. Vim supports block-wise pasting.
However, last I checked (vim7 might expose this), you can only
get a blockwise paste by yanking/deleting a blockwise selection.
Thus, you'd open a new window, paste your contents (which I
assume are coming from outside Vim), and then use control+V to
select the whole lot. Once it has been selected, you can
yank/delete it. Then, flip back over to your document and
navigate to the column in which you want to put the contents.
Simply use p (or P depending on your cursor location relative to
where you want the text) and it will put in the block of text
vertically as you describe. I don't think it will replace, but
rather insert text at the location. However, you can use a
similar means (control+V, select, "d") to delete the unwanted
text column.
This does assume that your document(s) is/are truely column-wise,
not tab-delimited or CSV columns.
To learn more, you can read up on blockwise-visual selection at
:help blockwise-visual
-tim
