how to add word to the start of select multi line

[668168]

for example, to add a list with -:

Before:

shellcommand is amazing.
wonderful tools for us.
thanks very mach.

After:
-. shellcommand is amazing.
-. wonderful tools for us.
-. thanks very mach.

[Taitava]

Hmm, this is an interesting question. 🙂

To be able to better answer this, I'd need to know which operating system you are using. For now, I'll just assume you are using macOS or Linux - but if you are using Windows, let me know and I'll come up with another solution that should work for Windows.

(I moved this discussion from Ideas to Q & A).

macOS/Linux solution

1. Define the following shell command: printf {{selection}} | sed -zE 's/(^|\n)/\1 - /g'
2. Define an alias for the shell command, e.g. Make list
3. Set the stdout output channel to be Current file: caret position.
4. Select some text in a note, open the command palette, and run the command Execute: Make list.

Btw. I assume that you meant to use - instead of -. but if you need the dot too, just add it after the dash - in the shell command.

The shell command is quite complex to explain throughout, but I'll try to cover it roughly:

1. printf {{selection}} | is used to pipe the selected text to the next command, which appears after the pipe character |.
2. sed -zE 's/(^|\n)/\1 - /g' does a search & replace operation using a regular expression, which can be a bit hard topic to learn if you don't know it yet.
   • (^|\n) is what we are searching for: we search for the beginning of the text, and also for each newline characters (denoted with \n).
   • \1 - is the replacement. For the first line, we will just add - at the beginning, and for all other lines, we are replacing a newline character with a newline plus -.
3. With the output channel set to Current file: caret position, we define that the output should replace the selected text in Obsidian.

The explanation was really complex because I wanted to make it short. Please let me know if you have any questions on some details, and I'll explain more.

[668168]

wow, so nice ,so detail explain ~~, best regard .
yes , i use macbook. friendly for *nux develop and bash shell .
before i post the question, i first idea is sed with Reqular expression too.
but i am pain with sed edit for much years /cry and lazy to study sed...., and I think, may be there is some other best saturation . such as sublime,vim with RE. or use python with RE, etc.

follow your suggest , may be I need to take some time to learn sed command . /cry . because may be sed is the only edit tools in shell environment .

[Taitava]

To be honest, I haven't used sed much myself. I'm familiar with regular expressions (from PHP, JavaScript and little bit of Python), so it helps me to understand the sed usage for the most parts, but I did need to do some research before I was able to provide the answer.

This was a really nice question to answer to, because I hadn't thought previously about using shell commands to add some text in front of all selected lines! 🙂 It was nice to find out that it actually worked quite well! 🥂

[668168]

yes, just for funny.
it is a SC tools, i has use it for many basic use and want to try some advance useage. it is usefull and wonderful .