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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

| the author typed a paragraph and then had to replace every “e” with a “|”

As a vim user, just thinking about doing this manually makes me tear up.

Yeah, especially because it's just a simple

  :%s/e/|/g

away.

Or, if you're really bored: ggfer| ;.;.<repeat>

Wouldn't that change the entire file, instead of just the one paragraph?

Why do you have to do it manually? In every common IDE you can mark your paragraph press Ctrl + R, and enter your search and replace values.

I would write a C program to do it before I would go and manually select/replace every instance using a mouse.

Depends if I'm being paid by the hour or the job :)

I assume you would call it sed?

I was trying to illustrate how far down the list I would go before resorting to manually selecting each character with a mouse. Sed is much higher on the list.

That's a little unfair. If I was only changing one or two characters then the mouse is fine. If I'm changing more than about 10-20 there will be a hunt for an alternative.

But what if, in the midst of writing this program, you need to rename all occurrences of a variable?

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