How do I normalize curly quotes to straight quotes in the current buffer?

Explanation

When text comes from docs, email, or CMS exports, it often contains typographic quotes (“”‘’) that break code snippets, Markdown tooling, or shell commands. This two-step substitution normalizes both double and single curly quotes across the whole buffer in place. It is fast, repeatable, and safer than manual replacement because the e flag avoids noisy errors if one quote type is absent.

How it works

• :%s/[“”]/\"/ge replaces every left/right curly double quote with a plain "
• <CR> executes that first substitution
• :%s/[‘’]/'/ge<CR> immediately runs a second substitution for curly apostrophes/single quotes
• g means replace all matches per line, not only the first
• e suppresses pattern not found errors so the command stays clean on mixed files

Example

Before:

He said “Ship it” and then wrote ‘done’.
It’s ready for “production”.

Run:

:%s/[“”]/"/ge
:%s/[‘’]/'/ge

After:

He said "Ship it" and then wrote 'done'.
It's ready for "production".

Tips

• Add c to either substitution (/gec) when you want per-match confirmation.
• If you prefer one line, you can join both substitutions with | interactively.
• Use this after paste/import steps to keep source files ASCII-clean before commits.