Since discovering Vim's visual (selection) mode I've found myself using it periodically, as I mentioned in passing recently. There have turned out to be a common circumstance I use it in and a second, rather less common case. More specifically, there is a common case for line-wise visual mode selection and a less common case where I reach for block-wise visual mode selections.

The common case for line wise visual selection is selectively reflowing quoted text in email messages. I'm a long time user of the very nice par command (also, and), which does a great job of reflowing quoted text, even multiply-quoted text, but you have to select how much you want to reflow. In my normal way of reflowing text, I reflow by selecting the paragraph with '}', but in my normal Vim setup using this on quoted text will reflow the entire block of quoted text. In other words, suppose I have:

> Some quoted text in a paragraph that I
> do want to reflow. This can run on.
>
> Tabular    data    to not  reflow
> some       data    points
> more       stuff

If I use '}' to select the entire 'paragraph' I'll reflow both sections. So what I do here is make a line-wise visual mode selection of just the first chunk and run it through par to reflow it. This case comes up surprisingly often, although there are probably Vim options I could set to make disturbingly smart about what a paragraph is.

Where I've found myself using block mode selection is where I have a prefix I want to remove or add to some lines, but the lines are already embedded in some other form of quoting at the start of the line. Unfortunately I haven't needed to do this recently enough to remember a real example, but suppose we have something like:

"     abc  more and more
"     def  stuff that is
"     ghi  going on

For whatever reason, I want to remove, insert a prefix, or otherwise manipulate the middle column (the 'abc', 'def', and 'ghi'). So I make a visual block selection, narrowing the scope of what I'm going to do to just the column, and then I can apply the change operation I want.

This sort of 'edit in the middle' can come up in editing configuration files, although unfortunately I can't remember the specific case where I first realized that visual block mode was the way to do what I wanted.

(I suspect I'll find other uses for visual mode over time. The comments on my first entry have some useful suggestions.)