Execute Multiple Commands in Vim

Today I needed to perform multiple transforms on a chunk of text in a file and found a nice solution in Vim! Initially I was thinking about VISUAL mode in Vim and chaining transforms the way I would do with sed (i.e. s/one/two/g;s/^/ /;s/$/,/). It turns out this doesn’t exactly work in Vim, but it’s not too far off the mark.

The following syntax works in Vim NORMAL mode:

:%s/^/  / | %s/string/replace/g | %s/$/,/

And in VISUAL mode, the sytax is slightly different. Select a bunch of lines to operate on, and then use the following:

:'<,'>s/^/  / | :'<,'>s/string/replace/g | :'<,'>s/$/,/