What is the difference between the remap noremap nnoremap and vnoremap mapping commands in Vim

Question

What is the difference between the remap  noremap  nnoremap and vnoremap mapping commands in Vim

User · Accepted Answer

remap is an option that makes mappings work recursively  By default it is on and I d recommend you leave it that way  The rest are mapping commands  described below   map and  noremap are recursive and non-recursive versions of the various mapping commands  For example  if we run   map j gg            moves cursor to first line   map Q j             moves cursor to first line   noremap W j         moves cursor down one line   Then   j will be mapped to gg  Q will also be mapped to gg  because j will be expanded for the recursive mapping  W will be mapped to j  and not to gg  because j will not be expanded for the non-recursive mapping   Now remember that Vim is a modal editor  It has a normal mode  visual mode and other modes  For each of these sets of mappings  there is a mapping that works in normal  visual  select and operator modes   map and  noremap   one that works in normal mode   nmap and  nnoremap   one in visual mode   vmap and  vnoremap  and so on  For more guidance on this  see   help  map  help  noremap  help recursive mapping  help  map-modes

User · Answer

I think the Vim documentation should ve explained the meaning behind the naming of these commands  Just telling you what they do doesn t help you remember the names   map is the  root  of all recursive mapping commands  The root form applies to  normal    visual select   and  operator-pending  modes   I m using the term  root  as in linguistics    noremap is the  root  of all non-recursive mapping commands  The root form applies to the same modes as map   Think of the nore prefix to mean  non-recursive      Note that there are also the   modes like map  that apply to insert  amp  command-line    See below for what  recursive  means in this context   Prepending a mode letter like n modify the modes the mapping works in  It can choose a subset of the list of applicable modes  e g  only  visual    or choose other modes that map wouldn t apply to  e g   insert     Use help map-modes will show you a few tables that explain how to control which modes the mapping applies to   Mode letters    n  normal only v  visual and select o  operator-pending x  visual only s  select only i  insert c  command-line l  insert  command-line  regexp-search  and others  Collectively called  Lang-Arg  pseudo-mode     Recursive  means that the mapping is expanded to a result  then the result is expanded to another result  and so on   The expansion stops when one of these is true    the result is no longer mapped to anything else  a non-recursive mapping has been applied  i e  the  noremap   or one of its ilk  is the final expansion     At that point  Vim s default  meaning  of the final result is applied executed    Non-recursive  means the mapping is only expanded once  and that result is applied executed   Example    nmap K H  nnoremap H G  nnoremap G gg   The above causes K to expand to H  then H to expand to G and stop  It stops because of the nnoremap  which expands and stops immediately  The meaning of G will be executed  i e   jump to last line    At most one non-recursive mapping will ever be applied in an expansion chain  it would be the last expansion to happen    The mapping of G to gg only applies if you press G  but not if you press K  This mapping doesn t affect pressing K regardless of whether G was mapped recursively or not  since it s line 2 that causes the expansion of K to stop  so line 3 wouldn t be used

User · Answer

One difference is that     map  does nvo    normal    visual   select    operator pending  map  does ic     insert   command-line mode   as stated on help map-modes tables   So  map does not map to all modes   To map to all modes you need both  map and  map

[vim] What is the difference between the remap, noremap, nnoremap and vnoremap mapping commands in Vim?

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