Need help trying to undo a VIM mistake

Question

So I'm practicing Ruby on Codeacademy and to save the work that I'm doing I copied and pasted my code onto my cmd prompt using VIM. However, I noticed that each line of code was commented with the '#' symbol and I wanted to remove them.

To be productive, I searched online how to use regex to search for all the hashtags and remove them with this command:

:%s/#//gc

Then this popped up:

replace with  (y/n/a/q/l/^E/^Y)?

I pressed y every time until the message disappeared and now I'm stuck with all hashtags characters being replaced with a yellow rectangle. So instead of having this:

I have this:

[] but shaded in yellow for every time I use a hastag.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Perhaps, you wanted to run `:%s/^#//g` to remove all `#` at the beginning of the lines. `c` prompts you to confirm each substitution. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Jun 22 '16 at 20:52
It does remove the hashtag symbol but it does the same thing where it highlights all hashtag characters. — FredTony, Jun 22 '16 at 21:00
Well, I have no clue what the issue is now. Please check the answer below, maybe you are looking for something not related to the regex at all at this moment — Wiktor Stribiżew, Jun 22 '16 at 21:02
No worries. The answer below helped. I really appreciate the help! — FredTony, Jun 22 '16 at 21:06
http://stackoverflow.com/a/99182/3832970 is exactly what I got for a "stop highlighting vim" Google request :) — Wiktor Stribiżew, Jun 22 '16 at 21:10

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 22 '16 at 20:55

0

The yellow rectangle represents the characters that matched your expression. To clear the last search highlighting, use:

:noh

To uncomment the lines of code, I would just do this:

Use V to select each line, then
:norm x

answered Jun 22 '16 at 20:55

Bill

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Thank you so much! I've learned something new today – FredTony Jun 22 '16 at 21:05

Need help trying to undo a VIM mistake

1 Answers1