insert characters in multiple lines

Sometime you would like to insert same characters into multiple lines. I have to confess that I’ve been using sed command to achieve this, say,

$ sed -e "s/^/> /g" in.txt > out.txt

You can do the same within vim.

• press ctrl + v
• press shift + i (I)
• input character(s) of your choice
• press esc

So easy...