Vim 101: Virtual Editing
Visual mode and Blockwise Visual mode have several associated settings. In this article, we’re going to look at virtualedit, which is definitely something to consider adding to your .vimrc.
To get up to speed with Visual mode, take a look at these previous Vim 101 articles:
The virtualedit setting basically allows block selections to operate across lines regardless of the underlying text. In this screenshot, I've pressed CTRL-V and selected a block. Notice how the block is limited to the characters in the file:
By typing set virtualedit=block, rectangular selections can be made. The shorthand for this is set ve=block. The cursor can now be placed anywhere — including after the ends of lines and in the middle of tabs:
Vim’s documentation for virtualedit (:help 've') suggests this is useful for selecting text in tables — imagine a space-separated text file of tabular data.
If you’re laying out plain text files in a strict tabular structure, then using set ve=all might be useful because moving beyond the end of a line and then switching to Insert mode and typing will cause extra spaces to be added. It's actually very intuitive.
