How to insert enough spaces to align text to column number using Vim?

Question

  COMP_ID=`      echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*COMP_ID=//'  -e 's/:.*$//'`
  SRC_TYP=`      echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*SRC_TYP=//'  -e 's/:.*$//'`
  DOC_TYP=`      echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*DOC_TYP=//'  -e 's/:.*$//'`
  SRC_ID=`       echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*SRC_ID=//'      -e 's/:.*$//'`
  ACC=`          echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*ACC=//'      -e 's/:.*$//'`
  PASS=`         echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*PASS=//'  -e 's/:.*$//'`
  POP=`          echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*POP=//'      -e 's/:.*$//'`
  REMOTE_HOST=`  echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*REMOTE_HOST=//'  -e 's/:.*$//'`
  REMOTE_PATH=`  echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*REMOTE_PATH=//'  -e 's/:.*$//'`
  ARCHIVE_PATH=` echo $SRC | sed -e 's/.*ARCHIVE_PATH=//' -e 's/:.*$//'`

Using vim (or vi) I want to align the sections with -e 's/:.*$//' to the same column number. What's the easiest and fastest way to do this? (ignore the ugly echo ..| sed .. bits for now)

Answer 1

For alignment, there are three well-known plugins:

• the venerable Align - Help folks to align text, eqns, declarations, tables, etc
• the modern tabular
• the contender vim-easy-align

With the first, your problem can be solved via

:%Align -e

Answer 2

You can do it with no plug-in, like this:

:%s#\(.*\)\zs\ze-e#\=repeat(' ',58-len(submatch(1)))

Note: This assumes that -e is the last of line. But you can capture it otherwise if it is not suitable to your case.

Explanation:

• %s#\(.*\) - captures the line before the -e.
• \zs\ze - starts and stops the match here.
• -e# - just before the -e.
• Using \zs and \ze here let us to add our spaces directly before -e (otherwise concatenation with .submatch(x) would have been possible).
• \=repeat(' ',58-len(submatch(1))) - replace this location with a variable number of spaces and where 58 is your aimed column.