Emad just asked me a vim question (how to use a search expression instead of a line number), and I ended up learning a new vim commmand from him as a side effect.
I’d done stuff like the following before to move text to a new file
This assumes you’d like to delete everything from the current position to the line just before the /Done/ search expression, and write it into /tmp/newfile.txt.
The mechanism here, is that the selection is filtered through a script, where the output of the script is empty, so the lines are deleted. This particular script has the side effect of creating a file with the selected range of lines. The end effect is that the text is moved.
If you’d like to keep it and copy it to the new file, you can tee instead of cat it:
This is faster than selecting a range, switching buffers copying into the buffer, saving, and switching buffers back.
Emad taught me that this can also be done with the w command, like so:
It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a faster way to copy text from one file to another than using tee, but since I knew one way, I never went looking for it.