Vim Is The Best

Recently I was working on a large JSON file similar to the one below.

{
  "fog_devices": [
    .
    .
    .
    {
      .
      .
      .
      "neighbors": [
        "cloud_device_0",
        "edge_device_1",
        "phone",
        "camera",
        "car"
      ],
      .
      .
      .
    },
    .
    .
    .
}

Afterwards, I understood that I should have written neighbors as a list of dictionaries instead of a list of strings as shown below.

{
  "fog_devices": [
    .
    .
    .
    {
      .
      .
      .
      "neighbors": [
        { "neighbor_id": "cloud_device_0" },
        { "neighbor_id": "edge_device_1" },
        { "neighbor_id": "phone" },
        { "neighbor_id": "camera" },
        { "neighbor_id": "car" }
      ],
      .
      .
      .
    },
    .
    .
    .
}

I was not looking forward to manually changing each line. I knew that Vim macros would be the best way to go about this and I was using Vim plugin on IntelliJ IDEA. So here is what I did.

1. I opend the file and moved the cursor to the first line of the neighbors list.
2. I pressed qa to start recording a macro in register a.
3. I pressed 0 to move the cursor to the beginning of the line.
4. I pressed f" to move the cursor to the first " character.
5. I pressed i{ "neighbor_id": to insert { "neighbor_id": at the beginning of the line.
6. I pressed Esc to exit insert mode.
7. I pressed f" twice to move the cursor to the second " character.
8. I pressed a } to insert ` }` at the end of the line.
9. I pressed Esc to exit insert mode.
10. I pressed j to move the cursor to the next line.
11. I pressed q to stop recording the macro.

Now I had a macro that would convert a line from the first format to the second format. I had to move the cursor to the each line of the neighbors list and run the macro by pressing @a.

All of this took me less than a minute. However, IntelliJ IDEA supports macros as well. So it may be possible to do the same thing without Vim, but why bother when Vim is the best and I can have it on all of my IDEs.