Vim Carnival & ASCII acceleration

2026-06-16

I came across Vim Carnival and current topic is "The motion that changed everything". I saw two entries and got curious what their motions are, I didn't know "~" can change case! and other one was character matching with 'f', which I also agree.

I thought a bit for this and realized I might have a motion I cheerish. I spend unhealthy time making ASCII arts, I have stash of it in the cyber basement (dead mailing lists) from a decade ago.

I started using Vim after searching for a nethack keybind-like editor, I got the order in reverse, My memories are vague now, but I think before playing nethack I never used a text editor, maybe few times on nano to setup the system but very blurry.

One of the first things I did after vimtutor was trying to create ASCII art, it was really painful. The accleration in creating came when I found out Ctrl+v visual block, it left like a magic. There are multiple sequence followed by this, but the one I use often is, replacing with ' '

Ctrl+v to select a chunk of character then 'r' followed by ' ', example with my recent ascii,

It feels like painting an ascii canvas! One another thing is adding a frame to the art, '|' on very row.
Ctrl+v, 10j, Shift+i, '|'

Seeing how coming back to normal mode gives a burst of character on each row, gets me every time. There are some other cool things with Ctrl+v, to generate seqence of number but those for not I use everyday, resevered to show off ;)