What's the best way to rearrange columns in a tab delimited text file in vim?

Question

I already know how to do it with

:%s/\(\S\+\)^I\(\S\+\)/\2^I\1/

but I feel like I'm typing way to much stuff. Is there a cleaner, quicker way to do it?

Answer 1

If the columns are lined up, you can use visual block mode by hitting Ctrl+V, then cut and paste. If the columns are not lined up, increase the tab width first so that it's longer than the content of the columns in question.

Answer 2

Best way to do it in VIM is - not to do it with VIM and (re)use existing tools for the job. *NIX specific solution:

:%!awk -F \\t '{print $2 FS $1}'

Would pipe the content of the tab-delimited file to awk and it will print first two columns swapped, separated by field separator (FS). awk can be also found for Windows.

P.S. Initially I wanted to write the same with cut but for whatever reason on my system the cut -f 2,1 (-d is not needed as TAB is the default delimiter) printed the fields in the same order, not swapped :|