How to write a column of consecutive integers in Vim over existing text?

Question

For example, imagine I had the following text:

/ apple
/ orange
/ banana
/ bread

How could I efficiently add consecutive integers in a column to make?

/1 apple
/2 orange
/3 banana
/4 bread

Note that in real problems, the list might be 20, 50, or more lines long.

Answer 1

One idea is to use vim's macro feature. Position the cursor on the first / in / apple, and do:

a1<Esc>

to insert the first number to start everything off (<Esc> being the escape key). Then with your cursor on the newly inserted 1, record the macro (into slot q):

qqyiwj0p<C-a>q

Now you should have the first 2 lines numbered. You now can run the macro n-2 times, where n is the total number of lines you have. As an example, if you had 50 lines, we run the macro 48 times since we already filled in 2 lines manually:

48@q

Answer 2

You could use the "pipe through an external command" feature that vim has. Open the file in vim, then do this:

:%!cat -n | awk '{print $2, $1, $3;}' | sed 's/ //'

You could probably dispense with the sed (which just deletes the first space in each line) by clever awk code. I just couldn't get it to work in 30 seconds, so I slopped out with sed.