Blocks of lines can be copied in Vim using ranges, i.e., two numbers separated by a comma indicating the start and end of the block of lines.

Some Examples

To copy line 20-25, use:

:20,25yank

To copy five lines just above the cursor:

:-4,.yank

where the period (.) indicates the current line.

To copy five lines just below the cursor:

:.,+4yank

Most Vim tutorials and cheatsheets out there will cover how to copy and paste. Pasting is the easy part. Let’s talk about copying!

Copying

To copy the current line (line in which the cursor is placed), simply press double lower y (yy) or single upper case y (Y).

yy or Y: copies/yanks the current line, including the newline character at the end of the line.

To copy a specific number of lines under the cursor (beginning from the current location of the cursor) simply precede the command with the number of lines that you wish to copy, i.e., Nyy (where N is the number of lines).

Of course, Vim is just a text editor but you can underline a line using a set of keystrokes that copies the string to be underlined to the next line and then replaces the string with hyphens using this set of Vim commands: YpVr-

So if you have a line:

This Is My Page Title

just position the cursor at the start of that line and enter the abovementioned commands and it will turn it into:

1. gg Move to the first line of the file
2. G Move to the last line
3. gg=G Reindent the whole file
4. gv Reselect the last visual selection
5. < Jump to beginning of last visual selection
6. > Jump to end of last visual selection
7. ^ Move to first non-blank character of the line
8. g_ Move the last non-blank character of the line (but you remove trailing whitespace, right)
9. g_lD Delete all the trailing whitespace on the line
10. ea Append to the end of the current word
11. gf Jump to the file name under the cursor
12. xp Swap character forward
13. Xp Swap character backward
14. yyp Duplicate the current line
15. yapP Duplicate the current paragraph
16. dat Delete around an HTML tag, including the tag
17. dit Delete inside an HTML tag, excluding the tag
18. w Move one word to the right
19. b Move one word to the left
20. dd Delete the current line
21. zc Close current fold
22. zo Open current fold
23. za Toggle current fold
24. zi Toggle folding entirely
25. << Outdent current line
26. >> Indent current line
27. z= Show spelling corrections
28. zg Add to spelling dictionary
29. zw Remove from spelling dictionary
30. ~ Toggle case of current character
31. gUw Uppercase until end of word (u for lower, ~ to toggle)
32. gUiw Uppercase entire word (u for lower, ~ to toggle)
33. gUU Uppercase entire line
34. gu$ Lowercase until the end of the line
35. da" Delete the next double-quoted string
36. + Move to the first non-whitespace character of the next line
37. S Delete current line and go into insert mode
38. I insert at the beginning of the line
39. ci" Change what’s inside the next double-quoted string
40. ca{ Change inside the curly braces (try [, (, etc.)
41. vaw Visually select word
42. dap Delete the whole paragraph
43. r Replace a character
44. [ Jump to beginning of last yanked text
45. ] Jump to end of last yanked text
46. g; Jump to the last change you made
47. g, Jump back forward through the change list
48. & Repeat last substitution on current line
49. g& Repeat last substitution on all lines
50. ZZ Save the current file and quit Vim

Suppose I have a file that I am editing in vim with the following contents:

$ cat file.txt Red 4 Blue 3 Green 1 Orange 7 Black 8 Yellow 6 Purple 2 White 5

In Vim you can perform a search like this: /string1/;/string2

This will will combine two searches. It tells Vim:

1. Search for string1, then
2. From there search for string2 on any line that also contains string1.

To edit a file remotely using the vim editor, just do the following in a terminal window:

$ scp://username@IP-address//path/to/file.txt

The user must have access to the file being edited.