Vim: How to insert in visual block mode?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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

Solution 3:

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

Solution 4:

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"