Vi question

[Hunki]

Situation :
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While editing in vi I most often face a situation when I have to do a shift-J to join lines .

Question:
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How can I determine which lines need to be joined instead of scrolling and looking over these lines within a long file.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Since you haven't defined what conditions define the need to join lines then other than using "The Force" how is anyone supposed to answer this question?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

If there is some criteria for joining lines, you may be able to write a shell script that reads from the original file and creates a second.

There must be some data that a machine can identify, otherwise your current methodology is all you have.

SEP

[Geoff Wild]

The real question is - how did the lines get disjoined in the first place?

Solve that, then you don't need to write a clever script to fix this...

Bottom line - you will have to go through the entire file...

You could do a

:set nu

in vi to see line numbers - that way you can scroll a page at a time.

Rgds...Geoff

[Steve Post]

I bet this is what you are looking for. I sure was for a number of years.

OK Let's call your file "myfile.txt." Let's have our formated file called "myfile.formated."

1. cat myfile.txt | sed G | adjust -m72 > myfile.formated
2. vi myfile.formated.
3. :g/^$/de
4. :wq!

Is this what you were looking for?

thingy ......explanation about it.

cat myfile.txt ....spit out the text.
sed G ....double space the file.
adjust -m72 ......WRAP that text when it gets to column 72. (Just like in typing class).

:g/^$/de ......
: ......ed mode
g ......for all lines
/^$/ ......where it is a blank line
de ......delete that line

:wq! ....... Write, Quit, and I really mean it.

Now file myfile.formated is probably what you wanted. Do a man page on adjust for more details.

Now what if you want it to be 200 characters wide and in 3 columns? Oh I think it would be time for perl.

[spex]

Hunki,

What criteria are you using to decide which lines should be joined together?

PCS

[Michael D. Zorn]

If it's really a text file (not a program source file), you can use the 'adjust'.

I set up a macro in '.exrc' like this:

map ^P {!}adjust -m72

With text on the screen, put the cursor anywhere in the paragraph, type 'CTRL-p' and the whole paragraph adjusts.

Starting at the bottom, hold down ctrl-p, and it will adjust paragraphs all the way to the top.

I'm curious about the "... most often face ...", which makes it sound like that's your most-used operation. What sort of text is it? Regular text, source code, data in text, ...?

[Steve Post]

I don't know about the author here, but "most often face" for me is that I'm typing a document, then I need to make it pretty to printout.

Since I can created documents 4 to 5 times faster in vi than in MS word, I try type in vi first.

Can you imagine keeping your fingers on the keyboard? Never looking for the mouse? Performing a 2000 mouse click operation with 10 keystrokes? VI: the ugly and extremely useful program.

OH OK....at least it is for me. I've been using it since 1987.