Vim Commands

These are notes on vim from Lesson 3 of Missing Semester, this lesson contains a lot of useful information about Vim.

Since I've written a quick introduction to vim, the notes on this post are just something to complement that article. I will probably update that article with these notes in the future.

The one thing that I loved learning in this lesson was how to create new windows and tabs. The lesson didn't mention how to cycle through them, so I did a quick search to figure out how to do it.

Normal mode:

• click X to remove a letter
• use :qa to close all windows

Vim windows can have tabs.

• use :sp to create a new windows
  • Cycle between tabs with ctrl+w
• use :tabnew to open a new tab that can contain a window or more
  • Move between tabs with ctrl+PgUp or ctrl+PgDn

Moving around

• use e to move to the end of the word
• 0 moves the cursor to the beginning of the line
• $ moves the cursor to the end of the line
• ^ moves to the first non-empty character of a line
• ctrl+u scrolls up
• ctrl+d scrolls down
• G moves to the end of the file
  • so does :$
• gg moves to the beginning of the file
• L moves to the lowest line in the screen
• M moves to the middle line in the screen
• H moves to the highest line in the screen
• f<character> moves the cursor to the first character - f stands for find
• t<character> move cursor to character
• /<word> search word

Editing commands

• u undo changes
• ctrl+r redo changes
• o opens a new line under the cursor
• O opens a new line on top of the cursor
• c change mode - used similarly to d but puts you in insert mode
  • ci' change word inside '
• x delete a character
• r replace character
• y copy
  • yy copy the whole line
  • pw copy word
• p paste
• ~ change the case of the selected text
• a append word
• . repeat the previous command