Vim’s command-line mode is a powerful tool for complex tasks. To enter this mode, press “:” in normal mode. Here you can execute Ex commands, which are more advanced than regular Vim commands. For instance, to replace all occurrences of ‘foo’ with ‘bar’ in the entire document, use ‘%s/foo/bar/g’. This uses the substitute (s) command on every line (%). The ‘g’ flag makes it global within each line.
You can also manipulate ranges of lines. For example, ‘1,3d’ deletes lines 1 through 3. Ranges can be relative (‘.,+2’) or pattern-based (‘/pattern/,/pattern/’).
Command-line mode supports tab completion and history navigation using arrow keys. It allows shell commands execution by prefixing them with ‘!’. For example, ‘:!ls’ lists directory contents.
For scripting purposes, Vim provides a built-in language called Vimscript. You can write functions, conditional statements, loops etc. directly in command-line mode or save them in a file for reuse.
