If you ever end up with a file looking something like the following and only want the second column, don’t start doing a macro or anything fancy.
Date,Title,Comments
2015-02-01,Simple use of cut in vim,5
2015-02-05,Extreme weather indoors,3
2015-02-10,Cars don't need wheels,8
All you need is the cut utility and a filter command.
:%!cut -d , -f 2
Where -d , defines that out delimiter is comma and -f 2 that we want the
second field (since the column numbering starts at 1). If your lines are
separated by white space (maybe a TAB) you don’t even need the -d.
:%!cut -f 2
If you only want a couple of lines, select the lines you want and hit : and
you’ll get the correct range.
:'<,'>!cut -f 2