Normal mode in Vim

I consider myself an advanced Vim user. But I always found annoying the multiple cursors support that Vim has (through vim-multiple-cursors) and below the Atom and Sublime standards.

For example, say I have this piece of SQL and I want to convert all the field names to lowercase:

1CREATE TABLE test (
2MYFIELD1 STRING,
3MYFIELD2 STRING,
4...
5MYFIELDN STRING
6)

Doing it with macros it tedious, and with multiple cursor, at least in Vim, it can be annoying, especially if you have lots of tables create like that, spanning multiple lines.

Enter normal mode

Normal mode comes to the rescue here: you just need to know which commands you would execute on one line to get the desired result (in this case _g~w) and the range of lines where the commands should be executed (in this case 2,5). Then it’s just a matter of typing :2,5norm _g~w and, almost magically, the code will be transformed in what we wanted!

1CREATE TABLE test (
2myfield1 STRING,
3myfield2 STRING,
4...
5myfieldn STRING
6)