Vim: insert the same characters across multiple lines

Question

Sometimes I want to edit a certain visual block of text across multiple lines.

For example, I would take a text that looks like this:

name
comment
ph         


        

Answer 1

Suppose you have this file:

something

name
comment
phone
email

something else
and more ...

You want to add "vendor_" in front of "name", "comment", "phone", and "email", regardless of where they appear in the file.

:%s/\<\(name\|comment\|phone\|email\)\>/vendor_\1/gc

The c flag will prompt you for confirmation. You can drop that if you don't want the prompt.