One could hide lines matching or !matching a certain pattern. Any
further edit actions were only executed with the visible lines as
target. Regardless what you were doing -- only the visible lines were
affected. You had to give the "unhide" command explicitely to return
to "full text mode".
There is a script snipped in the VimTips (#77) which does something
like this, but the "hidden" lines are not protected or "really
invisible until unhide"...
Is there a way to mimic this feature with vim in any way ?
Well, while it sounds like you may have already uncovered folding
(which will collapse/hide a bunch of lines into one), but as you
describe, it doesn't really protect those lines. However, there
are some things you can do do make them a little more protected.
If you're doing :s commands (or other Ex commands), you can
have them operate only over things that aren't currently folded
away by modifying your Ex statement to be:
:foldd s/foo/bar/g
You can read all about folding at
:help fold.txt
wherein you'll find
:help folddoopen
:help folddoclosed
which allow you to perform operations over sections of the file
that are/aren't folded.
You don't really describe what "protected" means...so perhaps if
there are particular things that stymie you, you can mention them
and perhaps a solution can be found for the particular problems.
If you just want to extract certain lines, you can make use of a
:g command, something like
:let @a=''
:g/pattern/y A
will gather all the lines matching "pattern" into the "a"
register. This can be dumped in another buffer if needed.
Or, I often find myself doing something like
:g/pattern/#
which will show me all the line numbers in the current file for
lines matching "pattern" (after which I can just jump to that
line by typing the line-number followed by "G").
Just a couple ideas...
-tim
