Applying Normal Mode Commands to a Range in Neovim

Suppose you are creating a list in python by yanking and pasting some content from another buffer. After pasting, the items are in place but are missing the trailing , required by python:

These trailing commas could be added manually, but that is a slow and repetitive task - particularly when working with larger lists. While we could make this significantly easier by defining a macro, Vim provides another solution that can automate these types of edits even more easily.

Vim allows normal mode commands to be applied to each line within a selected range using the :normal command.

To demonstrate, we first create a visual selection that contains each of the lines that we would like to edit:

Now, we need to define the command to be applied to each selected line. In this case, we want to:

1. Move the cursor to the end of each line,
2. Enter insert mode, then
3. Insert a ,

As we said earlier, this could be solved easily with a macro, but there is already a normal mode command that performs steps 1 and 2: A, which we can easily follow with the ,:.

A,

Finally, we execute this command by passing it to the :normal command like this:

:normal A,

Executing this command in our buffer provides the desired result:

Although applying normal mode commands in this way isn't as powerful as macros, in cases like this they can provide an even more convenient method of editing text.