Vim: Key Keys

For better or worse, I am making a significant effort to learn vim. No more shall I reach for the mouse to change some text or add a bracket! Ultimately my goal is not to necessarily stick with vim, but to be familar enough with its shortcuts to be able to switch to vim mode in another editor - perhaps Sublime. Perhaps even Visual Studio Code. Below are my notes on key keys, I plan to add to this as I learn new features of vim. I am also reading vim for humans, it focuses on making vim usable rather than teaching you the intricies and it is a good read if you want to be productive from the get-go. Along with this I did vimtutor which is a useful primer on vim shortcuts.

Navigation

• j, k to navigate lines.

• h, l to navigate characters.

• w next word

• b previous word

• e end of word

• % matching brace

• gg top of document

• G bottom of document

• 123G go to line 123

• CTRL + b page up

• CTRL + f page down

Insert Modes

• i to enter insert mode
• a to enter append after current character
• A to enter append at end of line

Deletion

• dd delete line
• x delete character

Replacement

• r[c] to replace current character with [c]
• R[c] to replace multiple characters with [c]

Search

• /searchtext to search forwards

• ?searchtext to search backwords

• n to go to next item

• :nc command to turn off case sensitivity

Undo and Redo

• u to undo the last command
• U to undo all changes to line
• CTRL + r to redo

Copy and Paste

• y for yank/copy
• p for put/paste
• v for visual selection

Misc

• CTRL + W, then W to switch windows

Saving and quitting

• :wqa save, close all windows and quit
• :w FILE write out to file