Whenever I’m mocking up a sample web page, I inevitably end up doing something like this;

Create a line;

<li id="1">This is item 1</li>

Copy it a bunch of times;

<li id="1">This is item 1</li>
<li id="1">This is item 1</li>
<li id="1">This is item 1</li>
<li id="1">This is item 1</li>
<li id="1">This is item 1</li>

Then change the numbers to this;

<li id="1">This is item 1</li>
<li id="2">This is item 2</li>
<li id="3">This is item 3</li>
<li id="4">This is item 4</li>
<li id="5">This is item 5</li>

The changing numbers part gets pretty tedious. By default, vim lets you use Ctrl-a¹ to increment the number under the cursor (or the next number after it), but I still need to press it once to go from 1 to 2, then reposition the cursor on the next line, and press Ctrl-a twice to go from 1 to 3, and so on. Very repetitive and annoying.

I went looking for a solution, and found the vim-visual-increment script. It hooks into the existing ‘increment number’ command but, if you do that when you’re in ‘visual block’ mode, it uses the first element in the selection as a base, and adds to subsquent elements, multiplying by the sequence number of the element in the selection. So, if you have the following, with the [] indicating the selected visual block;

<li id="[1]">This is item 1</li>
<li id="[1]">This is item 1</li>
<li id="[1]">This is item 1</li>
<li id="[1]">This is item 1</li>
<li id="[1]">This is item 1</li>

…then pressing Ctrl-a will give you this;

<li id="1">This is item 1</li>
<li id="2">This is item 1</li>
<li id="3">This is item 1</li>
<li id="4">This is item 1</li>
<li id="5">This is item 1</li>

Pretty neat. If you add set nrformats=alpha in your .vimrc file, you can even turn this;

This is item A
This is item A
This is item A
This is item A
This is item A

…into this;

This is item A
This is item B
This is item C
This is item D
This is item E

I think this is going to save me a lot of key-pounding. Check it out