Macro for making numbered lists in vim?

Question

Often times it seems I have a list of items, and I need to add numbers in front of them. For example:

Item one Item two Item three 

Which should be:

1. Item one 2. Item two 3. Item three 

In vim, I can press I in edit mode, insert "1.", hit escape. Then I go to the next line, press ., and then ^A to increment the number. This seems hugely inefficient... how would I make a macro so that I can go to the next line, and insert a number at the beginning which is one greater than the line before?

Answer 1

You can easily record a macro to do it.

First insert 1. at the start of the first line (there are a couple of spaces after the 1. but you can't see them).

Go to the start of the second line and go into record mode with qa.

Press the following key sequence:

i                         # insert mode <ctrl-Y><ctrl-Y><ctrl-Y>  # copy the first few characters from the line above   <ESC>                     # back to normal mode |                         # go back to the start of the line <ctrl-A>                  # increment the number j                         # down to the next line q                         # stop recording 

Now you can play back the recording with @a (the first time; for subsequent times, you can do @@ to repeat the last-executed macro) and it will add a new incremented number to the start of each line.

Answer 2

Select your lines in visual mode with: V, then type:

:'<,'>s/^\s*\zs/\=(line('.') - line("'<")+1).'. ' 

Which is easy to put in a command:

command! -nargs=0 -range=% Number <line1>,<line2>s/^\s*\zs/\=(line('.') - <line1>+1).'. '