Carriage return vs newline in vim

Question

In vim, when I opened a file, I wanted to add two empty lines at the end of each current line. I used the following switch:

%s/$/\n\n/

Apparently, this does not work, but what does work is:

%s/$/\r\r/

I thought \r is a Windows feature? Would anyone be able to explain a bit more.

Answer 1

From vim docs on patterns:

\r matches <CR>

\n matches an end-of-line - When matching in a string instead of buffer text a literal newline character is matched.

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71417/why-is-r-a-newline-for-vim

Answer 2

As @MartinvonWittich has stated you want to use \r. You can also use the keyboard combination:

Ctrl + v + M which typically get's display as ^M when typed.

%s/$/^M^M/

Here's some additionally useful info on vim with respect to search and replace:

When searching:

• ., *, \, [, ], ^, and $ are metacharacters.
• +, ?, |, {, }, (, and ) must be escaped to use their special function.
• \/ is / (use backslash + forward slash to search for forward slash)
• \t is tab, \s is whitespace
• \n is newline, \r is CR (carriage return = Ctrl-M = ^M)
• \{#\} is used for repetition. /foo.\{2\} will match foo and the two following characters. The \ is not required on the closing } so /foo.\{2} will do the same thing.
• \(foo\) makes a backreference to foo. Parenthesis without escapes are literally matched. Here the \ is required for the closing \).

When replacing:

• \r is newline, \n is a null byte (0x00).
• \& is ampersand (& is the text that matches the search pattern).
• \1 inserts the text of the first backreference. \2 inserts the second backreference, and so on.

References

• Vim: \n vs. \r
• Why is \r a newline for Vim?
• Search and replace