On Jan 16, 2012, at 10:05 AM, Tim Chase wrote: > On 01/16/12 08:54, Eric Weir wrote: >>> This morning, working in a large text document, I realized >> that all of a sudden all the upper case characters had been >> converted to lowercase. It seems I accidentally issued a >> command that has that effect. I believe at the time I had >> caps-lock on, had forgotten that, and issued a commonly-used >> command, probably a motion command, with it in effect. >> Fortunately I had saved recently and was able to recover most >> of the file from backup. > > Sounds like you used gu<motion>. Alternatively, if you were in visual mode, > you may have hit u to force the case change. > > :h gu > :h gU > :h v_u > :h v_U > :h v_~
Thanks, Tim--and to everyone else who responded. My guess is it was hitting u while in visual mode. I have not advanced to the stage of using commands beginning with a g or a v. I'll check out the ones you suggest. > And of course, if you hadn't reloaded the file and you had a sane setting for > 'undolevels' (though sometimes this gets backed off for huge files), you > could have just issued an undo. If you'd done other work since the incident, > you might have been able to copy the entire document into a new one, undo > back to before the case-change, diff the two windows, and then re-apply the > changes from the pasted results. I didn't think about undo, though I use it pretty often. "diff" is one of those things I hear about here that I haven't gotten around to checking out, yet. Likewise with "grep". I've assumed they're more relevant to programmers, which I definitely am not. But as you suggest with "diff," I'm pretty certain that even programmers' tools can be put to good use in plain old writing--if you've gone to the trouble of finding out about them. Again, thanks to all. Perhaps the beginning of another stage in my vim education. Sincerely, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Weir Decatur, GA USA [email protected] "Hatred destroys. Love heals." - Eknath Easwaran -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
