You want to run a command in VIM to replace all occurrences of foo with bar in the current buffer, but you made a typo in the command:

:%s/foor/bar/g

And you find nothing is replaced because of the typo foor. Now you press : and use the up arrow key to go back to the previous command, and you want to jump to the second r and delete it, now you have to press the left arrow key for six times and then press backspace to delete the r, that's a pain!

You wish you could edit the command just like in normal mode, so that you can press 2Frx to delete the second r, but you can't, because you are in command mode, not normal mode.

This is what this post is about! I'll show you how to edit in command mode in an efficient way.

Command-line window

There is a window called command-line window in VIM, when entering command mode by pressing :, you can open the command-line window with <ctrl-f>, and you will see a split window at the bottom of your window, showing the commands that you have executed, and the last line is the command you are currently typing.

When entering command-line window, you are in a regular buffer just like what you opened a file in VIM, you can use all the VIM commands to edit the command you are typing.

After typing the command, you can just press Enter, and the command will be executed.

You can even just navigate to a history command, and press Enter to re-run the command.

Paste register content in command mode

Besides editing the command in the command-line window, sometimes you might want to compose a complex command by copying some texts from the buffer, for example, you have the following texts:

This is a text with a very long word, intercommunication,
that you want to replace with a shorter word, communication.
And you have 345 lines below with the same words that you want to replace.

Now you want to replace intercommunication with communication, and you don't want to type the long word again and again in the command line, here is how you can do it:

Select the word intercommunication, and yank it to register a with "ay;
Select the word communication, and yank it to another register b with "by;
Enter command mode by pressing :, and type %s/<ctrl-r>a/<ctrl-r>b/g, and press Enter;

In the step 3, <ctrl-r> is used to paste the content of the register, a and b are the registers we yanked the words to, so you don't need to type the long words again.

For more example usages of VIM registers, please refer to my last post VIM registers explained, usages and examples.