Surround Several Words With Quotes At Once In vim

Question

I was curious if there is a way to surround several words at once with quotes using vim. I am using tpope surround and repeat but I was wondering if there is a command like

3ysw"

so from

one two three 

to

"one" "two" "three"

Answer 1

You can visually select the range with v3e, and then run a substitution command on it: :s/\v(\w+)/"\1"/g (the range '<,'> should automatically be inserted).

Personally though, I'd rather surround one word with ysw", and then do w.w. (repeat as often as needed).

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Alternatively, record a macro that does both steps (surrounding and moving on to the next word), then call it n times:

qqysw"3wq

After this is in your q register, you can then call 2@q to perform the surroundings on the remaining words.

Answer 2

When you want to enquote three words, beginning with the one your cursor is currently placed within, you can do:

bv3ec'<Ctrl+r>"'

b places the cursor at the beginning of the current word, v enters visual mode, 3e jumps at the end of the current 3-word sequence, c cuts the selection and enters insert mode, where you insert the left enclosing quote ' and press <Ctrl+r>" in order to paste current contents of the clipboard buffer, before you insert the other enclosing quote '.

Omit the leading b if you start off with the cursor at the first character of the first word.

Answer 3

Another substitution option

s,\w\+,"&",g

s ............. substitute current line (add %s for the whole file)
\w\+ .......... one word or more
"&" ........... & represents the whole match on the search part
g ............. every occurrence on the line

OBS: When using substitution we can use a different delimiter in order to make easy to type. (Also useful when searching for things like "/my/pattern/")