Read time: 1 minute

Suppose, you have a file with 1000 lines. You want to add some text at the beginning/end of each line. You won’t think of doing it manually (actually, I can’t stop you). Here, I am telling you how to save you a lot of time.

For example, we have the following lines in the file:

Name

Email

Phone Number

Address

And you want your output to be:

“Name”,

“Email”,

“Phone Number”,

“Address”,

and so on.

In Vim, you can simply type:

:%s/$/",/

It will place **”, **at the end of each line.

Similarly, for beginning:

:%s/^/"/

It will place “ at the beginning of each line.

Hence, we used $ for appending to end and ^ for prepending.

You can also do this for a few lines by visually selecting them with V and then pressing : and type the command

s/^/"/

Skip the “%” because we do it while doing things globally across the file. So it will look like:

:'<,'>s/^/"/

Another method, if you want to type some text interactively on a couple of lines:

Ctrl+V

Select a few rows (downside, pressing j). After selecting the position in couple in all rows, press:

Shift + i

They type what you want. Then press the Esc key:

Esc

Now, wait 1 second. You’ll see same text to be replicated over all rows you selected.

Please share in comments, if you even easier method to do the similar.