How to convert all text to lowercase in Vim

Question

How do you convert all text in Vim to lowercase? Is it even possible?

We have a lot of html pages with all characters in uppercase. This saves me time re-typing everything in lowercase. — ksuralta, Jul 13 '09 at 5:30
Before the question was edited, it was how to convert of all text in vim to small caps. Obviously, there's a use case for converting text to lowercase. — lemonad, Aug 8 '09 at 13:00
VIM website has the answer: vim.wikia.com/wiki/Switching_case_of_characters Thanks. — fnds, Nov 9 '12 at 16:43

abel · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-16 08:45:28Z

123

If you really mean small caps, then no, that is not possible – just as it isn’t possible to convert text to bold or italic in any text editor (as opposed to word processor). If you want to convert text to lowercase, create a visual block and press u (or U to convert to uppercase). Tilde (~) in command mode reverses case of the character under the cursor.
If you want to see all text in Vim in small caps, you might want to look at the guifont option, or type :set guifont=* if your Vim flavour supports GUI font chooser.

edited Apr 16 '15 at 8:45

abel

4504 silver badges14 bronze badges

answered Jul 9 '09 at 9:51

zoul

93.6k41 gold badges234 silver badges337 bronze badges

33

I think it's worth mentioning that you don't necessarily have to create a visual block to lowercase a block of text. guu will lowercase a line, and gu[motion] will lowercase that motion's worth of text. Likewise, gUU and gU[motion] work the same way, only for uppercase. – Zachary Murray Jul 9 '09 at 10:28
1

Actually, smallcaps are also possible for most letters, using ᴀʙcᴅᴇꜰɢʜıᴊᴋʟᴍɴoᴘʀsᴛᴜvwxʏz. – gerrit Aug 18 '15 at 12:52
1

That’s just a hack, though. These are not meant to be used as regular small caps and are not well supported by fonts. (On my desktop machine, the F renders strangely, on my phone it does not render at all, to give an example.) Anyway, interesting part of Unicode, thanks! – zoul Aug 21 '15 at 5:30
2

This answer is incorrect. user80168 has the correct answer. – Wayne Workman Nov 12 '19 at 4:46

add a comment |

Dave Jarvis · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-10 21:38:59Z

404

I assume you want lowercase the text. Solution is pretty simple:

ggVGu

Explanation:

gg - goes to first line of text
V - turns on Visual selection, in line mode
G - goes to end of file (at the moment you have whole text selected)
u - lowercase selected area

edited Oct 10 '12 at 21:38

Dave Jarvis

27.6k34 gold badges157 silver badges279 bronze badges

answered Jul 9 '09 at 10:10

user80168

88

or ggguG if you want to do it without visual selection. :help gu – DrAl Jul 9 '09 at 11:00
18

use capital U for uppercase (e.g. ggVGU) – Nathan Wallace Oct 21 '13 at 15:25

add a comment |

tarkeshwar · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-02 06:26:00Z

43

Similar to mangledorf's solution, but shorter and layman friendly

:%s/.*/\L&/g

answered Jan 2 '11 at 6:26

tarkeshwar

3,9854 gold badges25 silver badges32 bronze badges

3

:%s/.*/\L& would suffice (don't need the g flag since .* selects the entire line) – Gordon Gustafson Sep 28 '14 at 19:30
1

As would :%s/./\L&/g, since /g/ denotes an operation that is global for the line. What gets me, though, is the &. Why is that necessary? – Braden Best Oct 2 '14 at 3:51
1

& stands here for what was matched by the pattern, so it can be understood as follows: replace .* by \Lowercase(what was matched by the pattern). Note that matching on . globally is slower than matching .* – Camusensei Sep 2 '19 at 9:33

add a comment |

Kalanidhi · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-02 12:06:34Z

use this command mode option

ggguG


gg - Goto the first line 
g  - start to converting from current line    
u  - Convert into lower case for all characters
G  - To end of the file.

Alec Jacobson · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-18 17:01:38Z

27

Many ways to skin a cat... here's the way I just posted about:


:%s/[A-Z]/\L&/g

Likewise for upper case:


:%s/[a-z]/\U&/g

I prefer this way because I am using this construct (:%s/[pattern]/replace/g) all the time so it's more natural.

edited Nov 18 '13 at 17:01

answered Oct 18 '09 at 15:31

Alec Jacobson

5,0703 gold badges41 silver badges70 bronze badges

I think there is a Typo in the last example ('likewise for upper case') - the regex should change to [a-z] rather than '[A-Z]' . – monojohnny Nov 18 '13 at 16:13
1

:%s/./\U&/g also works. Turns out it ignores numbers and non-alphabet characters. What gets me is the &. Why isn't \U (or \L) by itself enough? Can we get an explanation for that? – Braden Best Oct 2 '14 at 3:43
2

& is a stand-in for the matched string. So \U& capitalizes the matched string so that it may be used for the replacement. – Alec Jacobson Oct 2 '14 at 13:56

add a comment |

Adolfo Abegg · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-08 11:33:26Z

23

Toggle case "HellO" to "hELLo" with g~ then a movement.
Uppercase "HellO" to "HELLO" with gU then a movement.
Lowercase "HellO" to "hello" with gu then a movement.

For examples and more info please read this: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Switching_case_of_characters

edited Jan 8 '14 at 11:33

answered Sep 8 '11 at 11:47

Adolfo Abegg

6676 silver badges15 bronze badges

I guess there isn't, but there's a less-than-intuitive substitution command for that in @mangledorf 's answer by replacing the desired characters with the escape sequence "\L&" for lowercase, and "\U&" for uppercase. What gets me is the &. \L and \U make perfect sense, but why is the & necessary? – Braden Best Oct 2 '14 at 3:42

add a comment |

Ziyadsk · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-14 20:56:36Z

10

use ggguG

gg : goes to the first line . gu : change to lowercase . G : goes to the last line .

answered Jan 14 '17 at 20:56

Ziyadsk

2684 silver badges7 bronze badges

1

How does that differ from the answer of Kalanidhi? – MSeifert Jan 14 '17 at 21:14
Upvoted to bring this to 0, which is an adequate score for an answer that is a copy of a previous one. @MSeifert Negative scores should be reserved for wrong / harmful solutions – Titou May 24 '18 at 18:59

add a comment |

user4104817user4104817 · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-14 06:15:46Z

Usually Vu (or VU for uppercase) is enough to turn the whole line into lowercase as V already selects the whole line to apply the action against.

Tilda (~) changes the case of the individual letter, resulting in camel case or the similar.

It is really great how Vim has many many different modes to deal with various occasions and how those modes are neatly organized.

For instance, v - the true visual mode, and the related V - visual line, and Ctrl+Q - visual block modes (what allows you to select blocks, a great feature some other advanced editors also offer usually by holding the Alt key and selecting the text).

ojblass · Accepted Answer · 2009-07-13 01:48:00Z

6

If you are running under a flavor of Unix

:0,$!tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"

answered Jul 13 '09 at 1:48

ojblass

19.3k22 gold badges72 silver badges120 bronze badges

4

The square brackets are superfluous, and once you remove those, the quotes aren't necessary either. :%!tr A-Z a-z – ephemient Jul 13 '09 at 4:21
The ! indicates an external shell command, so $ man tr (as opposed to :help tr) reveals that tr is for translate. – Braden Best Oct 2 '14 at 3:47
Just other way: :%0,$!tr [:upper:] [:lower:] – albertovar Jun 5 at 10:57

add a comment |

cmd · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-08 02:48:58Z

2

I had a similar issue, and I wanted to use ":%s/old/new/g", but ended up using two commands:

:0
gu:$

edited Oct 8 '13 at 2:48

cmd

10.5k6 gold badges45 silver badges58 bronze badges

answered Oct 8 '13 at 2:20

shaolinux

212 bronze badges

add a comment |

How to convert all text to lowercase in Vim

10 Answers 10

Your Answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged vim text-processing or ask your own question.

Linked

Hot Network Questions

How to convert all text to lowercase in Vim

10 Answers 10

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged vim text-processing or ask your own question.

Linked

Related

Hot Network Questions