Vim cheat sheet

Thanks to Ryan Eberhardt for this handout!

Here is a short cheat sheet of vim things I frequently use, meant to accompany my vim video:

• Vim works with motions, counts, and operators. For example, d5j applies the d (delete) operator to 5x the j motion, deleting 5 lines down.
• It’s really helpful to turn on relative line numbering so that you can quickly see how many lines up/down you want to copy or delete. Add this to your ~/.vimrc:

  set relativenumber
  set number
  

• Essential motions:
  • j – next line
  • k – previous line
  • l – going to the right
  • h – going to the left
  • w – word – go to the next word
  • b – back – go to the previous word
• Other helpful motions:
  • ^ – go to the beginning of the line
  • $ – go to the end of the line
  • % – jump to corresponding parentheses or bracket
  • f – jump to the first occurrence of a character (e.g. f) will jump to the nearest closing parentheses, or f, will jump to the closest comma)
  • F – jump to the first previous occurrence of a character
  • } – go to the end of the current paragraph
  • { – go to the beginning of the current paragraph
  • gg – go to top of file
  • 42gg – go to line 42
  • G – go to bottom of file
  • ctrl-o – go to previous location (helpful when you are jumping around multiple files)
  • ctrl-i – go to next location
  • Markers
    • ma – set marker “a” at the current line
    • 'a – jump to marker “a”
• Operators:
  • d – delete/cut
  • y – copy
  • p – paste
  • c – change: delete/cut and go into insert mode
  • Repeat operator twice to apply to entire line (e.g. dd – delete whole line)
  • Do operator uppercase to apply to the rest of the line (e.g. D – delete from the cursor until the end of the line)
  • v – go into visual mode
  • ctrl+v – go into visual block mode (helpful for indenting or commenting or otherwise modifying a block of code)
    • To indent, once in visual block mode, press I to insert at the beginning of the first line, and indent it as desired
    • To unindent, select the whitespace you want to remove, then press d or x
  • . – repeat the previous action
• Search/replace:
  • In command mode, type /your search term to search
  • n to go to next search result, N to go to previous search result
  • Type :%s/search term/replacement/g to replace all occurrences of search term in the current file
• Macros:
  • qw to record macro “w”. Do some editing, then press q to stop recording.
  • @w to replay macro “w”. This will play back all the keystrokes you recorded in the macro.