How to select a rectangular range in VIM

selectionvim

Assuming I have a text like

abc121313131abc
abc13153545464abc
abc4325435345abc
abc343535353535353abc

I want to select the abcs in front of the 4 lines.How can I do this?

CtrlV will allow you to visually select a rectangular block. Under Windows, try CtrlQ instead.

You can use vit to visually select text in a tag. See

:help v_it

You can use gn in version 7.4 onwards (and gN to go backwards). It replaces the v//e trick.

Search forward for the last used search pattern, like with `n`, and start Visual mode to select the match.

See :help gn or this Vimcast for more information.