Just getting to email now, so this is essentially a consolidated reply
to all who answered...
>>Speaking of which, is there any quicker way to visually select the
>>entire file, analogous to ^A in other systems?
>To copy the entire file to the system clipboard, you can do:
> :%y+
>Rpelace y with d if you want to cut instead of copy.
>Replace + with * if you want to use middle-click to paste (on X11.)
That's about the shortest I could come up with, ":%d+", to do what I
want, but still not quite what I was looking for. I was kindasorta
expecting a normal-mode solution, like 'gg*V' or something, to avoid
even toggling the shift key all that much (think "baud" vs "bps").
The only thing I really use it for is to c&p from LookOut's email to
'vim', then back again. So I ^A the entire reply, dump it into a new
'vim' window, edit it to insert a new quotelevel, etc., then want to
"^A" it to get it back into LO. But it's repetitive/frequent enough to
make me want to shorten the command further.
Ain't "hung up" on visual mode or anything (hi Tim!), it's just that
when I don't want headers at the top, I can start from the bottom ('G'),
make my way to the top in visual ('1G'), then down my way past the
headers to *not* grab them when putting it all back. Or v/v if I want
to skip the signature. Etc.
The 'vim' instance used to do the editing is going to disappear
immediately after, so I'm not concerned about cut vs copy, etc.
Everything goes into the "clipboard", then dumped back into LO's reply
window, so a plain ':%d' won't work.
In a similar vein, I was never much on "visual" vs *real* 'vi' commands,
but it does come in handy to delete subroutines, etc. Eg, for the
format
sub sub1(){
...
}
sub sub2(){
...
}
all you need to do it find the initial "sub", then "V$%jj" to grab the
whole thing, and delete it, copy it, cut it, etc. Go into visual,
end-of-line (for the leading '{'), '%' (for the matching '}'), down a
coupla lines to grab trailing whitespace, then bam!, it's gone. And
it's a visual confirmation to make sure you don't go nuts and delete
more than you intended.
Point being that for some operations, visual mode is a lot more
reassuring.
