Vim yanking range of lines

Question

Hello Everyone!

This is my first post on stack, so please bear with me.

I'm a C# developer who has just recently decided to expand my knowledge of the tools available to me. The first tool I've decided to learn is Vi/Vim. Everything has been going well so far, but there are a couple of questions I can't seem to find the answer to:

1) Lets say I wanted to yank a range of lines. I know there are many ways of doing so, but I would like to do it by line number. I figured it would be similar to how the substitute commands work, something like 81,91y. Is there a way to do this?

2) I'm a little confused about the g command in normal mode. It seems to do a myriad of things and I can't really determine what the g command does at its core. I'm confused on whether or not it's a motion command or a kind of "catch all" for other commands ran through normal mode. Can someone please explain this or point me to a reference that gives a good explanation of the g command?

Thank you all in advance, this is a wonderful community and I know I will not be disappointed in the response.

Answer 1

yank lines 81-91

:81,91y<enter>

my only use of "g" is 5gg. To go to the 5th line. 22gg: 22nd line. As jimbo said, it's really only a modifier for some other commands.

For completeness, (http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Power_of_g) explains a lot of how g works in command mode.

Answer 2

g doesn't do anything by itself. It's one of a couple meta-commands that holds a bunch of sorta-unrelated commands.

z is another one.

Answer 3

Vim's :help index describes g as:

|g|             g{char}            extended commands, see |g| below

Scroll down (or :help g) for a list.