I’ve gone years without knowing this. I can do pretty much what I need to do with Vim, but while hacking some Python recently I realized I’d really like to have the ability to select a block of text and repeatedly indent or unindent it. Visual Studio and PSPad make quick work of tasks like that.

You can, of course, do this in Vim. Here’s how:

First, to enter the visual select mode, type
V

Now, to select lines below that point, type
j

Repeatedly pressing j will move the cursor down line by line, selecting as it goes. You should see the block get highlighted. Finally, to indent the selected block, type
>

Or to unindent, type
<