How to flip the lines of a visual selection in vim?

Question

I want to take a visual selection and flip it so that the first line of the selection is on the bottom. From:

<other_stuff>
The
wheels
go
round.
<more_stuff>

Visual select the sentence and then flip:

<other_stuff>
round.
go
wheels
The
<more_stuff>

How to do this simply? I would rather not have to install a plugin to do it.

Answer 1

When you make a visual selection Vim automatically makes the bookmarks '< and '> at the start and end of the block respectively, so you can do what you want in a couple of ways.

In normal mode: '>dd'<P

As an ex command: :'>d | '<-1 put

NB the bookmarks remain after you exit visual mode, so you do not have to stay in visual mode to use these.

edit:

Oops, I misread the question and thought you only wanted the last line put at the start, but you want the entire block reversed. The simplest solution if you are on a unix system:

:'<,'>!tac

This pipes the lines through the unix 'reverse cat' program.

Answer 2

According to :help 12.4 you can mark the first line with the mt, move to the last line you want reversed then use the command :'t+1,.g/^/m 't