Note that this was written after I spent a few months learning Vim. If you’re just stuck in Vim and want to get out, see What to do when you get stuck in a Vim editor.

This will be another notey one. Really I just want to stick this somewhere I can easily access it. I’m going to publish my notes on the things that are useful in Vim but that I keep forgetting. My notes are split into four sections, so I’ll publish four posts:

• Miscellaneous Vim Stuff
• Vertical Columns in Vim (“visual blocks”)
• Navigating files, lines, blocks
• Searching in Vim

Before I get going though, a mildly funny anecdote: A colleague messaged me recently and mentioned that his vim had been upset by some house renovation work, and I wondered how said renovation could have such an impact on his command-line text editor…. before I realised that he meant vim as in “vim and vigour”.

OK, so here is some miscellaneous Vim stuff:

• Vim cheat sheet – http://hamwaves.com/vim.tutorial/images/vim.en.png
• Great online “Vim Adventures” game you can use to learn Vim: https://vim-adventures.com/
• If you make changes to ~/.vimrc and want to reload:
  • Type :so $MYVIMRC
  • …but actually you can just type $MY and then tab to autocomplete.
• Searching:
  • See Searching in Vim
• Navigating files, lines, blocks
  • See Navigating files, lines, blocks
• Copy / paste:
  • Copy current line (“yank”): yy – which is the same as Y
  • Paste current line below the line you are on (“put”): p
  • To replace one line with another: Y to yank a line, then go to the line you want to replace and type Vp
    • V puts the whole line into visual mode, and then p pastes the register into the visual selection (the whole line).
• Append, Substitute and Change
  • Append is a to append after current character or A to append at end of line
    • (puts you into insert mode)
  • Substitute is s to substitute current character and S to substitute current line
    • (puts you into insert mode)
  • Change is c to replace whatever you specify – eg aw for a word, iw for inner word (word without leading space)
    • (puts you into insert mode)
    • C is to replace from cursor to end of line
    • See also separate section below on navigating blocks
• Replace current word with contents of register: viwp
  • v is visual mode
  • iw is inner word
  • p is put
  • You might want to explicitly use the “0 register (like this: viw”0p), otherwise what’s in the default register might get replaced and if you try to repeat the action you get unexpected results
    • But for this to work, you will have to have used “0y (or whatever) first, to get your text into the correct register
• Select a vertical column of text (like alt click)
  • See Vertical Columns in Vim (“visual blocks”)
• Text objects:
  • aw is a word
  • iw is an inner word
  • daw means delete a word
  • More here: https://blog.carbonfive.com/2011/10/17/vim-text-objects-the-definitive-guide/
  • In Vim adventures, try :help aw
• To see line numbers: :set number
  • To make that change (or any other change) permanent:
    • Cmd: vim ~/.vimrc
    • Type the line :set number into the file
    • It will take effect immediately
  • To turn line numbers off temporarily (for copy/pasting): :se nonu (then :se number to turn them back on again)
• Do one command while in Insert mode, then return to Insert mode: Ctrl + o
  • This takes you to normal mode for one command
• Most commands in vim take a function and then an argument
  • Eg j is a movement argument – so dj is the delete command with a “down” argument
  • Commonly repeat the function if there is no argument – so dd means just delete
• u – undo
• Ctrl + r – Redo
• o – insert new line below (O = above)
  • Note this will also put you in insert mode
• Tab (indent) left or right: < and > – eg << to just tab left
  • To indent a whole block: Use v to go into visual mode, then up and down keys to select lines, then < and > to indent in or out
• Select an entire function definition
  • I used a{ and i{ but I never got quite what I wanted
  • I think the answer might lie here but I didn’t have the patience to read through all the suggested solutions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11723169/selecting-entire-function-definition-in-vim/11723259
• Set to use spaces instead of tabs
  • Cmd: :set expandtab ts=2 sw=2
  • ts = tabstop
    • Note this means that you can use the tab command and it will automatically insert 2 spaces
    • It also defines how he file will be displayed if it contains tab characters
  • sw = Shiftwidth
    • Something to do with what happens when you press enter, – automatic indentations?
• Multiples
  • Add number at start
  • Eg 2f_ – find the second instance of underscore on this line
• Delete characters – x for the char in front, X for the char behind (like backspace)
• d – delete line
  • dd – delete current line
  • 4dd – delete 4 lines
  • dG – Delete all lines from current line to end of file
  • Shift+d – delete to end of line
  • Shift+c – delete to end of line and go into insert mode
  • dw – delete a word
• J to join text that’s split across lines to turn it into one long string
  • Eg This…
    • Hey
      • Hello
        • You
      • And also
    • Goodbye
  • … becomes this:
    • Hey Hello You And also Goodbye

• Infrastructure
• Programming Tools & Languages