Vim: How to insert in visual block mode?

Question

Try this

After selecting a block of text, press Shift+i or capital I.

Lowercase i will not work.

Then type the things you want and finally to apply it to all lines, press Esc twice.

If this doesn't work...

Check if you have +visualextra enabled in your version of Vim.

You can do this by typing in :ver and scrolling through the list of features. (You might want to copy and paste it into a buffer and do incremental search because the format is odd.)

Enabling it is outside the scope of this question but I'm sure you can find it somewhere.

1. press ctrl and v // start select
2. press shift and i // then type in any text
3. press esc esc // press esc twice

You might also have a use case where you want to delete a block of text and replace it .

Like this

Hello World
Hello World

You can visual block select before "W" and hit Shift+i - Type "Cool" - Hit ESC and then delete "World" by visual block selection .

Alternatively, the cooler way to do it is to just visual block select "World" in both lines. Type c for change. Now you are in the insert mode. Insert the stuff you want and hit ESC. Both gets reflected with lesser keystrokes.

Hello Cool 
Hello Cool

if you want to add new text before or after the selected colum:

• press ctrl+v
• select columns
• press shift+i
• write your text
• press esc
• press "jj"