What is your most productive shortcut with Vim

Question

I ve heard a lot about Vim  both pros and cons  It really seems you should be  as a developer  faster with Vim than with any other editor  I m using Vim to do some basic stuff and I m at best 10 times less productive with Vim   The only two things you should care about when you talk about speed  you may not care enough about them  but you should  are    Using alternatively left and right hands is the fastest way to use the keyboard   Never touching the mouse is the second way to be as fast as possible  It takes ages for you to move your hand  grab the mouse  move it  and bring it back to the keyboard  and you often have to look at the keyboard to be sure you returned your hand properly to the right place    Here are two examples demonstrating why I m far less productive with Vim   Copy Cut  amp  paste  I do it all the time  With all the contemporary editors you press Shift  with the left hand  and you move the cursor with your right hand to select text  Then Ctrl C copies  you move the cursor and Ctrl V pastes   With Vim it s horrible    yy to copy one line  you almost never want the whole line    number xx yy to copy xx lines into the buffer  But you never know exactly if you ve selected what you wanted  I often have to do  number xx dd then u to undo    Another example  Search  amp  replace    In PSPad  Ctrl f then type what you want you search for  then press Enter  In Vim     then type what you want to search for  then if there are some special characters put   before each special character  then press Enter    And everything with Vim is like that  it seems I don t know how to handle it the right way   NB   I ve already read the Vim cheat sheet     My question is   What is the way you use Vim that makes you more productive than with a contemporary editor

User · Answer

nnoremap q  q  in my  vimrc  keeps the flow when crafting a complicated search amp replace

User · Answer

Inserting text to some bit in code   ctrl   v   selecting text on multiple lines   I   type something I want   ESC   Recording a macro to edit text and running it N times   q  a  or some other letter    do the things I want to record   q  ESC   type N  as in the number of times I want to run the macro      a

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Session  a  save session      mks sessionname   b  force save session      mks  sessionname   c  load session     gvim or vim -S sessionname     Adding and Subtracting  a  Adding and Subtracting     CTRL-A         Add  count  to the number or alphabetic character at                or after the cursor    not in Vi      CTRL-X         Subtract  count  from the number or alphabetic               character at or after the cursor    not in Vi    b  Window key unmapping     In window    Ctrl-A already mapped for whole file selection you need to unmap in rc file    mark mswin vim CTRL-A mapping part as comment    or    add your rc file with  unmap    c  With Macro     The CTRL-A command is very useful in a macro   Example     Use the following steps to make a numbered list          Create the first list entry  make sure it starts with a number    qa      - start recording into buffer  a    Y      - yank the entry   p      - put a copy of the entry below the first one   CTRL-A    - increment the number   q      - stop recording    a - repeat the yank  put and increment  times

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Automatic indentation   gg  go to start of document     indent time   shift-g  go to end of document   You ll need  filetype plugin indent on  in your  vimrc file  and probably appropriate  shiftwidth  and  expandtab  settings

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In addition to the great reply about grokking vi  it should be noted that vim does add some very vi-like features that make using vi commands nicer  The one that comes to mind first are text objects  instead of    fmt to reformat the current paragraph   apfmt does the same  It works by first specifying that we want to select a text object  which is the current paragraph  Similar  to change the current string literal  foo to bar for an example   instead of T ct bar  move to just after the previous    change until just before the next    insert bar   you can say ci bar  change inside  innermost  quotes  inserting bar   Thinking in terms of text objects instead of movement commands is quite nice

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Bulk text manipulations   Either through macros    Start with recording  qq Do stuff Stop recording  q Repeat   q  the first time      after that  Repeat 20 times  20     Or through regular expressions    Replace stuff    s  fo   bar g    But be warned  if you do the latter  you ll have 2 problems

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Multiple buffers  and in particular fast jumping between them to compare two files with  bp and  bn  properly remapped to a  single Shift   p or Shift   n   vimdiff mode  splits in two vertical buffers  with colors to show the differences   Area-copy with Ctrl   v  And finally  tab completion of identifiers  search for  mosh tab or complete    That s a life changer

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I recently discovered q    It opens the  command window  and shows your most recent ex-mode  command-mode  commands   You can move as usual within the window  and pressing  lt CR gt  executes the command   You can edit  etc  too   Priceless when you re messing around with some complex command or regex and you don t want to retype the whole thing  or if the complex thing you want to do was 3 commands back   It s almost like bash s set -o vi  but for vim itself  heh     See  help q  for more interesting bits for going back and forth

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I just discovered Vim s omnicompletion the other day  and while I ll admit I m a bit hazy on what does which  I ve had surprisingly good results just mashing either Ctrl   x Ctrl   u or  Ctrl   n Ctrl  p in insert mode  It s not quite IntelliSense  but I m still learning it   Try it out   help ins-completion

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Ignoring the question for a moment  my answer is below   a couple of things that might help with your problems with vim    map  lt C-F gt    V   This will make Ctrl-F start a search with the first characters of the search being  V  which turns off all the  magic   so you don t have to escape anything  just like PsPad      CTRL-X and SHIFT-Del are Cut vnoremap  lt C-X gt    x vnoremap  lt S-Del gt    x    CTRL-C and CTRL-Insert are Copy vnoremap  lt C-C gt    y vnoremap  lt C-Insert gt    y    CTRL-V and SHIFT-Insert are Paste map  lt C-V gt          gP map  lt S-Insert gt         gP  cmap  lt C-V gt        lt C-R gt   cmap  lt S-Insert gt       lt C-R gt      taken directly out of mswin vim from the Vim distribution    This will give you Ctrl-C  Ctrl-V etc for copying and pasting   Personally  I find the copying and pasting much better with the standard Vim   In Vim I can have the cursor on a line  type yy to copy it  10p to paste 10 copies of it   With the Align plugin  I can then use Ctrl-V  assuming the windows mappings above aren t used  to visual-block select a column of numbers that has been created   II then auto-increments that column of numbers   Similarly  with YankRing  I can copy 10  or more  lines one after another and then paste them back out one after another   As for the way that Vim makes me more productive  I would say that the tags file is the one thing I couldn t do without anymore   When the cursor is over a tag  I can press Ctrl-  to go to the function  and Ctrl-T to return  as many levels as I like  or  p to open the function or macro definition  or whatever  in the preview window  which can then be quickly closed with  pcl  or  i to just show a macro definition on the status bar   For navigating complex source code  these tools are invaluable   The preview window one does rely on a mapping in  vimrc  however    map  p  ptag  lt C-R gt  lt C-W gt  lt CR gt    The tags file also allows the use of a couple of  my  plugins that give syntax highlighting that shows errors much more clearly  by highlighting recognised tags and not highlighting unrecognised ones  and tag signatures when you move the mouse over a keyword

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You can search the content of a register   Suppose that your register x contains     string to search   To search this string  you have to type in normal mode  CTRL-rxENTER  It ll paste the content of x register

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I was surprised to find no one mention the t movement  I frequently use it with parameter lists in the form of dt  or yt

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Quick Cut and Overwrite portion of a line    A very common task when you are editing a line is to cut from the current cursor location till a certain place and overwrite the new content    You can use the following commands    ct lt identifier gt  for forward cutting   cT lt identifier gt  for backward cutting   Where  is the character in the line till which you want to cut    Example  Lets say this the line you want to edit and your cursor is at I   Hi There  I am a Coder and I code in   Python and R   You want to cut till   and overwrite with I am a programmer  you type  ct  then type I am a programmer  This will result in  Hi There  I am a programmer  Python and R   Quick Delete portion of a line   Just like above the following commands delete the content from the current cursor location till the  identifier   dt lt identifier gt  for forward delete  dT lt identifier gt  for backward delete  Hope this is useful to you too

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What is the way you use Vim that makes   you more productive than with a   contemporary editor    Being able to execute complex  repetitive edits with very few keystrokes  often using macros   Take a look at VimGolf to witness the power of Vim   After over ten years of almost daily usage  it s hard to imagine using any other editor

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lt Ctrl gt    W  V to split the screen vertically   lt Ctrl gt    W  W to shift between the windows   python    args  to run the script I am editing in this window  ZF in visual mode to fold arbitrary lines

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You are talking about text selecting and copying  I think that you should give a look to the Vim Visual Mode   In the visual mode  you are able to select text using Vim commands  then you can do whatever you want with the selection   Consider the following common scenarios   You need to select to the next matching parenthesis   You could do    v  if the cursor is on the starting ending parenthesis vib if the cursor is inside the parenthesis block     You want to select text between quotes    vi  for double quotes  vi  for single quotes     You want to select a curly brace block  very common on C-style languages     viB vi      You want to select the entire file    ggVG    Visual block selection is another really useful feature  it allows you to select a rectangular area of text  you just have to press Ctrl-V to start it  and then select the text block you want and perform any type of operation such as yank  delete  paste  edit  etc  It s great to edit column oriented text

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After mapping the below to a simple key combo  the following are very useful for me   Jump into a file while over its path   gf   get full path name of existing file    r echo   p   get directory of existing file    r echo   p h   run code     ruby   p   ruby abbreviations   ab if do if end lt esc gt bi lt cr gt  lt esc gt xhxO ab if else if end lt esc gt bi lt cr gt  lt esc gt xhxO else lt esc gt bhxA lt cr gt   lt esc gt k O ab meth def method lt cr gt end lt esc gt k lt esc gt  s method  ab klas class KlassName lt cr gt end lt esc gt k lt esc gt  s KlassName  ab mod module ModName lt cr gt end lt esc gt k lt esc gt  s ModName    run current program      map  rby  w  lt cr gt   ruby   p lt cr gt    check syntax of current program      map  c  w  lt cr gt   ruby -c   p lt cr gt    run all specs for current spec program      map  s  w  lt cr gt   rspec   p lt cr gt    crack it open irb      map  i  w  lt cr gt   irb lt cr gt    rspec abreviations      ab shared examples shared examples for  behavior here  do lt cr gt end    ab shared behavior describe  description here  do lt cr gt   before  each do lt cr gt end lt cr gt it should behave like  behavior here  lt cr gt  lt bs gt end lt cr gt     ab describe do describe  description here  do lt cr gt end    ab context do describe  description here  do lt cr gt end    ab it do it  description here  do lt cr gt end    ab before each before  each do lt cr gt end lt cr gt    rails abbreviations   user authentication        ab userc  lt esc gt  r  VIMRUNTIME Templates Ruby c-users rb lt cr gt       ab userv  lt esc gt  r  VIMRUNTIME Templates Ruby v-users erb lt cr gt       ab userm  lt esc gt  r  VIMRUNTIME Templates Ruby m-users rb lt cr gt    open visually selected url in firefox    function    function open url in firefox  copy text       let g open url in firefox  silent  open -a   firefox       a copy text           exe g open url in firefox    endfunction   abbreviations    map  d  call open url in firefox  expand    p    lt cr gt     map go y call open url in firefox   0  lt cr gt     rspec  run spec containing current line    function    function run single rspec test  the test       let g rake spec   rspec   a the test     line           exe g rake spec    endfunction   abbreviations    map  s  call run single rspec test  expand    p    lt cr gt    rspec-rails  run spec containing current line    function    function run single rails rspec test  the test       let g rake spec   rake spec SPEC     a the test     line                exe g rake spec    endfunction   abbreviations    map  r  call run single rails rspec test  expand    p    lt cr gt    rspec-rails  run spec containing current line with debugging    function    function run spec containing current line with debugging  the test       let g rake spec   rake spec SPEC     a the test     line        -d         exe g rake spec    endfunction   abbreviations    map  p  call run spec containing current line with debugging  expand    p     lt cr gt    html   abbreviations     ab htm  lt html gt  lt cr gt  lt tab gt  lt head gt  lt cr gt  lt  head gt  lt cr gt  lt body gt  lt cr gt  lt  body gt  lt cr gt  lt bs gt  lt bs gt  lt  html gt     ab template html  lt script type    text template  id    templateIdHere  gt  lt  script gt     ab script i  lt script src    gt  lt  script gt     ab script m  lt script gt  lt cr gt  lt  script gt     ab Tpage  lt esc gt  r    vim templates pageContainer html lt cr gt     ab Ttable  lt esc gt  r    vim templates listTable html lt cr gt    function to render common html template     function html          call feedkeys   i    t         call feedkeys   lt html gt   lt cr gt    lt head gt   lt cr gt  lt  head gt   lt cr gt  lt body gt   lt cr gt      t        call feedkeys     lt esc gt     t         call feedkeys   i    t         call include js         call feedkeys    lt bs gt   lt bs gt  lt  body gt   lt cr gt    lt esc gt hxhxi lt  html gt     t      endfunction   javascript    jasmine js    abbreviations    ab describe js describe  description here   function    lt cr gt        ab context js context  context here   function    lt cr gt        ab it js it  expectation here   function    lt cr gt        ab expect js expect   toEqual       ab before js beforeEach function    lt cr gt        ab after js afterEach function    lt cr gt       function abbreviations     ab fun1 function     lt esc gt i lt cr gt  lt esc gt ko    ab fun2 x function      lt esc gt hi lt cr gt     ab fun3 var x function    lt cr gt      method for rendering inclusion of common js files     function include js         let includes 0        lt link   type    text  css  rel    stylesheet  href      Users  johnjimenez  common  stylesheets  jasmine-1 1 0  jasmine css    gt        let includes 1        lt link   type    text  css  rel    stylesheet  href      Users  johnjimenez  common  stylesheets  screen css    gt        let includes 2      lt script type    text  javascript  src      Users  johnjimenez  common  javascripts  jquery-1 7 2  jquery-1 7 2 js  gt  lt   script gt        let includes 3      lt script type    text  javascript  src      Users  johnjimenez  common  javascripts  underscore  underscore js  gt  lt   script gt        let includes 4      lt script type    text  javascript  src      Users  johnjimenez  common  javascripts  backbone-0 9 2  backbone js  gt  lt   script gt        let includes 5      lt script type    text  javascript  src      Users  johnjimenez  common  javascripts  jasmine-1 1 0  jasmine js  gt  lt   script gt        let includes 6      lt script type    text  javascript  src      Users  johnjimenez  common  javascripts  jasmine-1 1 0  jasmine-html js  gt  lt   script gt        let includes 7      lt script gt        let includes 8       describe  default page   function           let includes 9     it  should have an html tag   function           let includes 10      expect      head    html     not toMatch       s  t  n              let includes 11               let includes 12              let includes 13      function          let includes 14    jasmine getEnv   addReporter  new jasmine TrivialReporter            let includes 15    jasmine getEnv   execute          let includes 16              let includes 17      lt bs gt   lt bs gt  lt   script gt         let j   0       while j  lt  18        let entry    includes     j        call feedkeys   entry    t           call feedkeys     lt cr gt     t           let j   j   1      endwhile     endfunction   jquery     abbreviations       ab docr   document  ready function            ab jqfun    lt cr gt function    lt cr gt   lt cr gt

User · Answer

You can use    in an substitution string and is something I do every so often    If you have what s essentially an unordered list in vim  say using   as a marker  you can convert it over to an ordered list     CSSLINT   PHPCS   Charlie   Delta   If it starts on line one  you can do   1 6s     line      g   To convert it over to  1 CSSLINT 2 PHPCS 3 Charlie 4 Delta   If it doesn t start on line one  just do the maths    16 20s     line      - 15 g   More info at  help sub-replace-expression

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These are not shortcuts  but they are related    Make capslock an additional ESC  or Ctrl  map leader to      comma   with this command  let mapleader       They boost my productivity

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All in Normal mode   f lt char gt  to move to the next instance of a particular character on the current line  and   to repeat   F lt char gt  to move to the previous instance of a particular character on the current line and   to repeat   If used intelligently  the above two can make you killer-quick moving around in a line     on a word to search for the next instance     on a word to search for the previous instance

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CTRL   A increments the number you are standing on

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Agreed with the top poster - the  r  command is very useful   Most often I use it to  paste  things    r cat   Ctrl-V to paste from the OS clipboard    D   This way I don t have to fiddle with  set paste

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Ctrl-w Ctrl-f              open file under cursor in new window Ctrl-6                     alternate file  0                         open last file  x                         close if save

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Use the builtin file explorer  The command is  Explore and it allows you to navigate through your source code very very fast  I have these mapping in my  vimrc   map  lt silent gt   lt F8 gt     Explore lt CR gt  map  lt silent gt   lt S-F8 gt   sp  Explore lt CR gt    The explorer allows you to make file modifications  too  I ll post some of my favorite keys  pressing  lt F1 gt  will give you the full list    -  The most useful  Change to upper directory  cd     mf  Mark a file D  Delete marked files or the file the cursor is on  if nothing ismarked  R  Rename the file the cursor is on  d  Create a new directory in the current directory    Create a new file in the current directory

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Actually I was always losing my buffers  so the way I usually copy a range of lines is to just write it to a temp file  and then read it in at the appropriate spot   e g   ka   set the mark    a   w  t   copy everything form the mark into the file t      move your cursor around       r t   read in t into the current spot    This probably involves fewer keystrokes than using the buffer  is easier to keep track of  and you can have long lived paste files around  I usually use 1 letter names for the files  for speed   The key reason why this is fast is that to move your cursor around you just use the search function      and  n  if you run into another occurrence of the pattern before you get to where you want to go

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There is loads of vim tricks but as of now  the one that I really enjoy is Ctrl A as I happen to be dealing with some st  d code that hard-code array index

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How about further shortcutting shortcuts      Put into your  vimrc  nnoremap       This way entering commmandmode ist way easier    q or  w work  instead just  q or  w    Two keystrokes instead of three  and you will need this very often     Bad for sysadmins  since they need the same functionality to be given out of the box to be the same on every box everywhere   But a HUGE improvement for programmers using vi

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A third criteria for making editing faster is the number of keystrokes required   I would say this is more important than your other 2   In vim  almost all operations require fewer keystrokes than any other editor I m familiar with   You mention that you are having trouble with cut  amp  paste  but it sounds like you need more experience with general motion commands in vim   yank 3 words  y3w   yank from the cursor to the next semi-colon  yf   yank to the next occurrence of your most recent search  yn  All of those are much faster than trying to navigate with a mouse while holding down a modifier key  Also  as seen in some of the examples in CMS s response  vim s motion commands are highly optimized for efficient navigation in C and C   source code   As to the question  how do I use vim that makes me more productive    I hope the answer is   efficiently

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I recently  got  discovered this site  http   vimcasts org   It s pretty new and really really good  The guy who is running the site switched from textmate to vim and hosts very good and concise casts on specific vim topics  Check it out

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cit     empty the contents of the tag with the transition in insert mode  yit     copy the contents of the tag

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Vim Plugins  There are a lot of good answers here  and one amazing one about the zen of vi   One thing I don t see mentioned is that vim is extremely extensible via plugins   There are scripts and plugins to make it do all kinds of crazy things the original author never considered   Here are a few examples of incredibly handy vim plugins    rails vim  Rails vim is a plugin written by tpope  It s an incredible tool for people doing rails development   It does magical context-sensitive things that allow you to easily jump from a method in a controller to the associated view  over to a model  and down to unit tests for that model   It has saved dozens if not hundreds of hours as a rails developer    gist vim  This plugin allows you to select a region of text in visual mode and type a quick command to post it to gist github com   This allows for easy pastebin access  which is incredibly handy if you re collaborating with someone over IRC or IM     space vim  This plugin provides special functionality to the spacebar   It turns the spacebar into something analogous to the period  but instead of repeating actions it repeats motions   This can be very handy for moving quickly through a file in a way you define on the fly    surround vim  This plugin gives you the ability to work with text that is delimited in some fashion   It gives you objects which denote things inside of parens  things inside of quotes  etc   It can come in handy for manipulating delimited text    supertab vim  This script brings fancy tab completion functionality to vim   The autocomplete stuff is already there in the core of vim  but this brings it to a quick tab rather than multiple different multikey shortcuts   Very handy  and incredibly fun to use   While it s not VS s intellisense  it s a great step and brings a great deal of the functionality you d like to expect from a tab completion tool   syntastic vim  This tool brings external syntax checking commands into vim   I haven t used it personally  but I ve heard great things about it and the concept is hard to beat   Checking syntax without having to do it manually is a great time saver and can help you catch syntactic bugs as you introduce them rather than when you finally stop to test    fugitive vim  Direct access to git from inside of vim   Again  I haven t used this plugin  but I can see the utility   Unfortunately I m in a culture where svn is considered  new   so I won t likely see git at work for quite some time    nerdtree vim  A tree browser for vim   I started using this recently  and it s really handy   It lets you put a treeview in a vertical split and open files easily   This is great for a project with a lot of source files you frequently jump between     FuzzyFinderTextmate vim  This is an unmaintained plugin  but still incredibly useful   It provides the ability to open files using a  fuzzy  descriptive syntax   It means that in a sparse tree of files you need only type enough characters to disambiguate the files you re interested in from the rest of the cruft     Conclusion  There are a lot of incredible tools available for vim   I m sure I ve only scratched the surface here  and it s well worth searching for tools applicable to your domain   The combination of traditional vi s powerful toolset  vim s improvements on it  and plugins which extend vim even further  it s one of the most powerful ways to edit text ever conceived   Vim is easily as powerful as emacs  eclipse  visual studio  and textmate     Thanks  Thanks to duwanis for his vim configs from which I have learned much and borrowed most of the plugins listed here

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Use  c anywhere in a search to ignore case  overriding your ignorecase or smartcase settings   E g    cfoo or  foo c will match foo  Foo  fOO  FOO  etc   Use  C anywhere in a search to force case matching  E g    Cfoo or  foo C will only match foo

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Here is another site that I found helpful in learning Vim  It s fun too         VIM Adventures is an online game based on VIM s keyboard shortcuts    commands  motions and operators   It s the  Zelda meets text editing    game  It s a puzzle game for practicing and memorizing VIM commands    good old VI is also covered  of course   It s an easy way to learn   VIM without a steep learning curve

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Some productivity tips   Smart movements     and    search for the word under the cursor forward backward  w to the next word W to the next space-separated word b   e to the begin end of the current word   B   E for space separated only  gg   G jump to the begin end of the file    jump to the matching        or         etc         jump to next paragraph     jump back to last edited line  g  jump back to last edited position    Quick editing commands   I insert at the begin  A append to end  o   O open a new line after before the current  v   V   Ctrl V visual mode  to select text   Shift R replace text C change remaining part of line    Combining commands  Most commands accept a amount and direction  for example    cW   change till end of word 3cW   change 3 words BcW   to begin of full word  change full word ciW   change inner word  ci    change inner between      ci    change text between        ci lt    change text between  lt         needs set matchpairs   lt   gt  in vimrc  4dd   delete 4 lines 3x   delete 3 characters  3s   substitute 3 characters    Useful programmer commands   r replace one character  e g  rd replaces the current char with d     changes case  J joins two lines Ctrl A   Ctrl X increments decrements a number    repeat last command  a simple macro     fix line indent  gt  indent block  in visual mode   lt  unindent block  in visual mode    Macro recording   Press q  key   to start recording  Then hit q to stop recording  The macro can be played with    key      By using very specific commands and movements  VIM can replay those exact actions for the next lines   e g  A for append-to-end  b   e to move the cursor to the begin or end of a word respectively   Example of well built settings    reset to vim-defaults if  amp compatible            only if not set before    set nocompatible        use vim-defaults instead of vi-defaults  easier  more user friendly  endif    display settings set background dark       enable for dark terminals set nowrap                dont wrap lines set scrolloff 2           2 lines above below cursor when scrolling set number                show line numbers set showmatch             show matching bracket  briefly jump  set showmode              show mode in status bar  insert replace      set showcmd               show typed command in status bar set ruler                 show cursor position in status bar set title                 show file in titlebar set wildmenu              completion with menu set wildignore   o   obj   bak   exe   py co    swp      pyc  svn set laststatus 2          use 2 lines for the status bar set matchtime 2           show matching bracket for 0 2 seconds set matchpairs   lt   gt        specially for html    editor settings set esckeys               map missed escape sequences  enables keypad keys  set ignorecase            case insensitive searching set smartcase             but become case sensitive if you type uppercase characters set smartindent           smart auto indenting set smarttab              smart tab handling for indenting set magic                 change the way backslashes are used in search patterns set bs indent eol start   Allow backspacing over everything in insert mode  set tabstop 4             number of spaces a tab counts for set shiftwidth 4          spaces for autoindents  set expandtab             turn a tabs into spaces  set fileformat unix       file mode is unix  set fileformats unix dos      only detect unix file format  displays that  M with dos files    system settings set lazyredraw            no redraws in macros set confirm               get a dialog when  q   w  or  wq fails set nobackup              no backup  files  set viminfo  20   500     remember copy registers after quitting in the  viminfo file -- 20 jump links  regs up to 500 lines  set hidden                remember undo after quitting set history 50            keep 50 lines of command history set mouse v               use mouse in visual mode  not normal insert command help mode     color settings  if terminal gui supports it  if  amp t Co  gt  2    has  gui running     syntax on            enable colors   set hlsearch         highlight search  very useful     set incsearch        search incremently  search while typing  endif    paste mode toggle  needed when using autoindent smartindent  map  lt F10 gt   set paste lt CR gt  map  lt F11 gt   set nopaste lt CR gt  imap  lt F10 gt   lt C-O gt  set paste lt CR gt  imap  lt F11 gt   lt nop gt  set pastetoggle  lt F11 gt     Use of the filetype plugins  auto completion and indentation support filetype plugin indent on    file type specific settings if has  autocmd       For debugging    set verbose 9      if bash is sh    let bash is sh 1      change to directory of current file automatically   autocmd BufEnter   lcd   p h      Put these in an autocmd group  so that we can delete them easily    augroup mysettings     au FileType xslt xml css html xhtml javascript sh config c cpp docbook set smartindent shiftwidth 2 softtabstop 2 expandtab     au FileType tex set wrap shiftwidth 2 softtabstop 2 expandtab        Confirm to PEP8     au FileType python set tabstop 4 softtabstop 4 expandtab shiftwidth 4 cinwords if elif else for while try except finally def class   augroup END    augroup perl       reset  disable previous  augroup perl  settings      au         au BufReadPre BufNewFile         pl   pm       set formatoptions croq smartindent shiftwidth 2 softtabstop 2 cindent cinkeys  0  0    F o O e    tags   tags tags   devel tags   devel C       formatoption          t - wrap text using textwidth         c - wrap comments using textwidth  and auto insert comment leader          r - auto insert comment leader when pressing  lt return gt  in insert mode         o - auto insert comment leader when pressing  o  or  O           q - allow formatting of comments with  gq          a - auto formatting for paragraphs         n - auto wrap numbered lists            augroup END       Always jump to the last known cursor position       Don t do it when the position is invalid or when inside     an event handler  happens when dropping a file on gvim      autocmd BufReadPost          if line         gt  0  amp  amp  line         lt   line                 exe  normal g              endif   endif   has  autocmd     The settings can be stored in    vimrc  or system-wide in  etc vimrc local and then by read from the  etc vimrc file using   source  etc vimrc local    you ll have to replace the   comment character with   to make it work in VIM  I wanted to give proper syntax highlighting here    The commands I ve listed here are pretty basic  and the main ones I use so far  They already make me quite more productive  without having to know all the fancy stuff

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Another useful vi  shortcut  I frequently use is  xp   This will swap the character under the cursor with the next character

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clever tab completion     http   vim wikia com wiki Smart mapping for tab completion

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Spend 30 mins doing the vim tutorial  run vimtutor instead of vim in terminal   You will learn the basic movements  and some keystrokes  this will make you at least as productive with vim as with the text editor you used before  After that  well  read Jim Dennis  answer again

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For Copy Cut and Paste specifically  using visual mode makes it much easier to adapt from other editors  So the way I normally cut and paste is    Esc - exit Insert mode  skip if you are already in Normal mode  v - turn on visual mode move about the file to select the text you want - visual mode will show you what characters are selected  For a few words w  e and b are useful  move to start of next word  end of next word and start of this previous word respectively   d - cut the text  use y if you want to copy the text  move about to where you want the text to go p - paste  this pastes after the current character  P pastes before the current character    Also useful is using V to go into Visual mode  line  which selects whole lines automatically  where ever the cursor is on the line

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Visual Mode  As several other people have said  visual mode is the answer to your copy cut  amp  paste problem   Vim gives you  v    V   and C-v   Lower case  v  in vim is essentially the same as the shift key in notepad   The nice thing is that you don t have to hold it down   You can use any movement technique to navigate efficiently to the starting  or ending  point of your selection   Then hit  v   and use efficient movement techniques again to navigate to the other end of your selection   Then  d  or  y  allows you to cut or copy that selection   The advantage vim s visual mode has over Jim Dennis s description of cut copy paste in vi is that you don t have to get the location exactly right   Sometimes it s more efficient to use a quick movement to get to the general vicinity of where you want to go and then refine that with other movements than to think up a more complex single movement command that gets you exactly where you want to go   The downside to using visual mode extensively in this manner is that it can become a crutch that you use all the time which prevents you from learning new vi m  commands that might allow you to do things more efficiently   However  if you are very proactive about learning new aspects of vi m   then this probably won t affect you much   I ll also re-emphasize that the visual line and visual block modes give you variations on this same theme that can be very powerful   especially the visual block mode   On Efficient Use of the Keyboard  I also disagree with your assertion that alternating hands is the fastest way to use the keyboard   It has an element of truth in it   Speaking very generally  repeated use of the same thing is slow   This most significant example of this principle is that consecutive keystrokes typed with the same finger are very slow   Your assertion probably stems from the natural tendency to use the s finger hand  transformation on this pattern   To some extent it s correct  but at the extremely high end of the efficiency spectrum it s incorrect   Just ask any pianist   Ask them whether it s faster to play a succession of a few notes alternating hands or using consecutive fingers of a single hand in sequence   The fastest way to type 4 keystrokes is not to alternate hands  but to type them with 4 fingers of the same hand in either ascending or descending order  call this a  run     This should be self-evident once you ve considered this possibility   The more difficult problem is optimizing for this   It s pretty easy to optimize for absolute distance on the keyboard   Vim does that   It s much harder to optimize at the  run  level  but vi m  with it s modal editing gives you a better chance at being able to do it than any non-modal approach  ahem  emacs  ever could   On Emacs  Lest the emacs zealots completely disregard my whole post on account of that last parenthetical comment  I feel I must describe the root of the difference between the emacs and vim religions   I ve never spoken up in the editor wars and I probably won t do it again  but I ve never heard anyone describe the differences this way  so here it goes   The difference is the following tradeoff   Vim gives you unmatched raw text editing efficiency Emacs gives you unmatched ability to customize and program the editor  The blind vim zealots will claim that vim has a scripting language   But it s an obscure  ad-hoc language that was designed to serve the editor   Emacs has Lisp   Enough said   If you don t appreciate the significance of those last two sentences or have a desire to learn enough about functional programming and Lisp to develop that appreciation  then you should use vim   The emacs zealots will claim that emacs has viper mode  and so it is a superset of vim   But viper mode isn t standard   My understanding is that viper mode is not used by the majority of emacs users   Since it s not the default  most emacs users probably don t develop a true appreciation for the benefits of the modal paradigm   In my opinion these differences are orthogonal   I believe the benefits of vim and emacs as I have stated them are both valid   This means that the ultimate editor doesn t exist yet   It s probably true that emacs would be the easiest platform on which to base the ultimate editor   But modal editing is not entrenched in the emacs mindset   The emacs community could move that way in the future  but that doesn t seem very likely   So if you want raw editing efficiency  use vim   If you want the ultimate environment for scripting and programming your editor use emacs   If you want some of both with an emphasis on programmability  use emacs with viper mode  or program your own mode    If you want the best of both worlds  you re out of luck for now

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gi  Go to last edited location  very useful if you performed some searching and than want go back to edit    P and  N  Complete previous   P  or next   N  text     O and  I  Go to previous   O -  O  for old  location or to the next   I -  I  just near to  O    When you perform searches  edit files etc   you can navigate through these  jumps  forward and back

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Your problem with Vim is that  you don t grok vi  You mention cutting with yy and complain that you almost never want to cut whole lines   In fact programmers  editing source code  very often want to work on whole lines  ranges of lines and blocks of code   However  yy is only one of many way to yank text into the anonymous copy buffer  or  quot register quot  as it s called in vi   The  quot Zen quot  of vi is that you re speaking a language   The initial y is a verb   The statement yy is a synonym for y   The y is doubled up to make it easier to type  since it is such a common operation  This can also be expressed as dd P  delete the current line and paste a copy back into place  leaving a copy in the anonymous register as a side effect    The y and d  quot verbs quot  take any movement as their  quot subject  quot   Thus yW is  quot yank from here  the cursor  to the end of the current next  big  word quot  and y a is  quot yank from here to the line containing the mark named  a   quot  If you only understand basic up  down  left  and right cursor movements then vi will be no more productive than a copy of  quot notepad quot  for you    Okay  you ll still have syntax highlighting and the ability to handle files larger than a piddling  45KB or so  but work with me here   vi has 26  quot marks quot  and 26  quot registers  quot   A mark is set to any cursor location using the m command   Each mark is designated by a single lower case letter   Thus ma sets the  a  mark to the current location  and mz sets the  z  mark   You can move to the line containing a mark using the    single quote  command   Thus  a moves to the beginning of the line containing the  a  mark   You can move to the precise location of any mark using the    backquote  command   Thus   z will move directly to the exact location of the  z  mark  Because these are  quot movements quot  they can also be used as subjects for other  quot statements  quot  So  one way to cut an arbitrary selection of text would be to drop a mark  I usually use  a  as my  quot first quot  mark   z  as my next mark   b  as another  and  e  as yet another  I don t recall ever having interactively used more than four marks in 15 years of using vi  one creates one s own conventions regarding how marks and registers are used by macros that don t disturb one s interactive context    Then we go to the other end of our desired text  we can start at either end  it doesn t matter   Then we can simply use d a to cut or y a to copy   Thus the whole process has a 5 keystrokes overhead  six if we started in  quot insert quot  mode and needed to Esc out command mode    Once we ve cut or copied then pasting in a copy is a single keystroke  p  I say that this is one way to cut or copy text   However  it is only one of many   Frequently we can more succinctly describe the range of text without moving our cursor around and dropping a mark   For example if I m in a paragraph of text I can use   and   movements to the beginning or end of the paragraph respectively   So  to move a paragraph of text I cut it using   d   3 keystrokes     If I happen to already be on the first or last line of the paragraph I can then simply use d  or d  respectively  The notion of  quot paragraph quot  defaults to something which is usually intuitively reasonable   Thus it often works for code as well as prose  Frequently we know some pattern  regular expression  that marks one end or the other of the text in which we re interested   Searching forwards or backwards are movements in vi   Thus they can also be used as  quot subjects quot  in our  quot statements  quot   So I can use d foo to cut from the current line to the next line containing the string  quot foo quot  and y bar to copy from the current line to the most recent  previous  line containing  quot bar  quot   If I don t want whole lines I can still use the search movements  as statements of their own   drop my mark s  and use the   x commands as described previously  In addition to  quot verbs quot  and  quot subjects quot  vi also has  quot objects quot   in the grammatical sense of the term    So far I ve only described the use of the anonymous register   However  I can use any of the 26  quot named quot  registers by prefixing the  quot object quot  reference with  quot   the double quote modifier    Thus if I use  quot add I m cutting the current line into the  a  register and if I use  quot by foo then I m yanking a copy of the text from here to the next line containing  quot foo quot  into the  b  register   To paste from a register I simply prefix the paste with the same modifier sequence   quot ap pastes a copy of the  a  register s contents into the text after the cursor and  quot bP pastes a copy from  b  to before the current line  This notion of  quot prefixes quot  also adds the analogs of grammatical  quot adjectives quot  and  quot adverbs   to our text manipulation  quot language  quot   Most commands  verbs  and movement  verbs or objects  depending on context  can also take numeric prefixes  Thus 3J means  quot join the next three lines quot  and d5  means  quot delete from the current line through the end of the fifth paragraph down from here  quot  This is all intermediate level vi   None of it is Vim specific and there are far more advanced tricks in vi if you re ready to learn them   If you were to master just these intermediate concepts then you d probably find that you rarely need to write any macros because the text manipulation language is sufficiently concise and expressive to do most things easily enough using the editor s  quot native quot  language   A sampling of more advanced tricks  There are a number of   commands  most notably the    s foo bar g global substitution technique    That s not advanced but other   commands can be    The whole   set of commands was historically inherited by vi s previous incarnations as the ed  line editor  and later the ex  extended line editor  utilities   In fact vi is so named because it s the visual interface to ex    commands normally operate over lines of text   ed and ex were written in an era when terminal screens were uncommon and many terminals were  quot teletype quot   TTY  devices   So it was common to work from printed copies of the text  using commands through an extremely terse interface  common connection speeds were 110 baud  or  roughly  11 characters per second -- which is slower than a fast typist  lags were common on multi-user interactive sessions  additionally there was often some motivation to conserve paper   So the syntax of most   commands includes an address or range of addresses  line number  followed by a command   Naturally one could use literal line numbers   127 215 s foo bar to change the first occurrence of  quot foo quot  into  quot bar quot  on each line between 127 and 215   One could also use some abbreviations such as   or   for current and last lines respectively   One could also use relative prefixes   and - to refer to offsets after or before the curent line  respectively   Thus      j meaning  quot from the current line to the last line  join them all into one line quot       is synonymous with  1    all the lines   The      g and      v commands bear some explanation as they are incredibly powerful        g is a prefix for  quot globally quot  applying a subsequent command to all lines which match a pattern  regular expression  while      v applies such a command to all lines which do NOT match the given pattern   quot v quot  from  quot conVerse quot     As with other ex commands these can be prefixed by addressing range references   Thus     21g foo d means  quot delete any lines containing the string  quot foo quot  from the current one through the next 21 lines quot  while     v bar d means  quot from here to the end of the file  delete any lines which DON T contain the string  quot bar  quot  It s interesting that the common Unix command grep was actually inspired by this ex command  and is named after the way in which it was documented    The ex command  g re p  grep  was the way they documented how to  quot globally quot   quot print quot  lines containing a  quot regular expression quot   re    When ed and ex were used  the  p command was one of the first that anyone learned and often the first one used when editing any file   It was how you printed the current contents  usually just one page full at a time using     25p or some such   Note that    g     d or  its reVerse conVerse counterpart     v     d are the most common usage patterns   However there are  couple of other ex commands which are worth remembering  We can use m to move lines around  and j to join lines   For example if you have a list and you want to separate all the stuff matching  or conversely NOT matching some pattern  without deleting them  then you can use something like     g foo m      and all the  quot foo quot  lines will have been moved to the end of the file    Note the other tip about using the end of your file as a scratch space    This will have preserved the relative order of all the  quot foo quot  lines while having extracted them from the rest of the list    This would be equivalent to doing something like  1G GGmap Ggrep foo lt ENTER gt 1G 1  a g foo  d  copy the file to its own tail  filter the tail through grep  and delete all the stuff from the head   To join lines usually I can find a pattern for all the lines which need to be joined to their predecessor  all the lines which start with  quot      quot  rather than  quot      quot  in some bullet list  for example    For that case I d use     g      -1j  for every matching line  go up one line and join them    BTW  for bullet lists trying to search for the bullet lines and join to the next doesn t work for a couple reasons     it can join one bullet line to another  and it won t join any bullet line to all of its continuations  it ll only work pairwise on the matches   Almost needless to mention you can use our old friend s  substitute  with the g and v  global converse-global  commands   Usually you don t need to do so   However  consider some case where you want to perform a substitution only on lines matching some other pattern   Often you can use a complicated pattern with captures and use back references to preserve the portions of the lines that you DON T want to change   However  it will often be easier to separate the match from the substitution     g foo s bar zzz g -- for every line containing  quot foo quot  substitute all  quot bar quot  with  quot zzz  quot    Something like    s     foo    bar        1zzz 2 g would only work for the cases those instances of  quot bar quot  which were PRECEDED by  quot foo quot  on the same line  it s ungainly enough already  and would have to be mangled further to catch all the cases where  quot bar quot  preceded  quot foo quot   The point is that there are more than just p  s  and d lines in the ex command set  The   addresses can also refer to marks   Thus you can use    a  bg foo j to join any line containing the string foo to its subsequent line  if it lies between the lines between the  a  and  b  marks    Yes  all of the preceding ex command examples can be limited to subsets of the file s lines by prefixing with these sorts of addressing expressions   That s pretty obscure  I ve only used something like that a few times in the last 15 years   However  I ll freely admit that I ve often done things iteratively and interactively that could probably have been done more efficiently if I d taken the time to think out the correct incantation  Another very useful vi or ex command is  r to read in the contents of another file   Thus   r foo inserts the contents of the file named  quot foo quot  at the current line  More powerful is the  r  command   This reads the results of a command   It s the same as suspending the vi session  running a command  redirecting its output to a temporary file  resuming your vi session  and reading in the contents from the temp  file  Even more powerful are the    bang  and         ex bang  commands   These also execute external commands and read the results into the current text  However  they also filter selections of our text through the command   This we can sort all the lines in our file using 1G Gsort  G is the vi  quot goto quot  command  it defaults to going to the last line of the file  but can be prefixed by a line number  such as 1  the first line    This is equivalent to the ex variant  1   sort   Writers often use   with the Unix fmt or fold utilities for reformating or  quot word wrapping quot  selections of text   A very common macro is    fmt  reformat the current paragraph    Programmers sometimes use it to run their code  or just portions of it  through indent or other code reformatting tools  Using the  r  and   commands means that any external utility or filter can be treated as an extension of our editor   I have occasionally used these with scripts that pulled data from a database  or with wget or lynx commands that pulled data off a website  or ssh commands that pulled data from remote systems  Another useful ex command is  so  short for  source    This reads the contents of a file as a series of commands   When you start vi it normally  implicitly  performs a  source on    exinitrc file  and Vim usually does this on    vimrc  naturally enough    The use of this is that you can change your editor profile on the fly by simply sourcing in a new set of macros  abbreviations  and editor settings   If you re sneaky you can even use this as a trick for storing sequences of ex editing commands to apply to files on demand  For example I have a seven line file  36 characters  which runs a file through wc  and inserts a C-style comment at the top of the file containing that word count data   I can apply that  quot macro quot  to a file by using a command like  vim   so mymacro ex    mytarget  The   command line option to vi and Vim is normally used to start the editing session at a given line number   However it s a little known fact that one can follow the   by any valid ex command expression  such as a  quot source quot  command as I ve done here  for a simple example I have scripts which invoke  vi    foo d wq      ssh known hosts to remove an entry from my SSH known hosts file non-interactively while I m re-imaging a set of servers   Usually it s far easier to write such  quot macros quot  using Perl  AWK  sed  which is  in fact  like grep a utility inspired by the ed command   The   command is probably the most obscure vi command   In occasionally teaching advanced systems administration courses for close to a decade I ve met very few people who ve ever used it     executes the contents of a register as if it were a vi or ex command  Example  I often use   r locate     to find some file on my system and read its name into my document   From there I delete any extraneous hits  leaving only the full path to the file I m interested in   Rather than laboriously Tab-ing through each component of the path  or worse  if I happen to be stuck on a machine without Tab completion support in its copy of vi  I just use   0i r  to turn the current line into a valid  r command    quot cdd  to delete the line into the  quot c quot  register  and  c execute that command   That s only 10 keystrokes  and the expression  quot cdd  c is effectively a finger macro for me  so I can type it almost as quickly as any common six letter word    A sobering thought I ve only scratched to surface of vi s power and none of what I ve described here is even part of the  quot improvements quot  for which vim is named   All of what I ve described here should work on any old copy of vi from 20 or 30 years ago  There are people who have used considerably more of vi s power than I ever will

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My most productive vi Vim trick is     s   I love being able to use regular expressions on the fly to replace whatever I want inside the file  Every text editor should support regular expressions IMHO

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I am a member of the American Cryptogram Association   The bimonthly magazine includes over 100 cryptograms of various sorts   Roughly 15 of these are  cryptarithms  - various types of arithmetic problems with letters substituted for the digits   Two or three of these are sudokus  except with letters instead of numbers   When the grid is completed  the nine distinct letters will spell out a word or words  on some line  diagonal  spiral  etc   somewhere in the grid   Rather than working with pencil  or typing the problems in by hand  I download the problems from the members area of their website   When working with these sudokus  I use vi  simply because I m using facilities that vi has that few other editors have   Mostly in converting the lettered grid into a numbered grid  because I find it easier to solve  and then the completed numbered grid back into the lettered grid to find the solution word or words   The problem is formatted as nine groups of nine letters  with -s representing the blanks  written in two lines   The first step is to format these into nine lines of nine characters each   There s nothing special about this  just inserting eight linebreaks in the appropriate places   The result will look like this   T-O-----C -E-----S- --AT--N-L ---NASO-- ---E-T--- --SPCL--- E-T--OS-- -A-----P- S-----C-T   So  first step in converting this into numbers is to make a list of the distinct letters   First  I make a copy of the block   I position the cursor at the top of the block  then type  y  p     puts me in command mode  y yanks the next movement command   Since   is a move to the end of the next paragraph  y  yanks the paragraph     then moves the cursor to the end of the paragraph  and p pastes what we had yanked just after the cursor   So y  p creates a copy of the next paragraph  and ends up with the cursor between the two copies   Next  I to turn one of those copies into a list of distinct letters   That command is a bit more complex      tr -cd A-Z   sed  s        1 n g    sort -u   tr -d   n      again puts me in command mode     indicates that the content of the next yank should be piped through a command line     yanks the next paragraph  and the command line then uses the tr command to strip out everything except for upper-case letters  the sed command to print each letter on a single line  and the sort command to sort those lines  removing duplicates  and then tr strips out the newlines  leaving the nine distinct letters in a single line  replacing the nine lines that had made up the paragraph originally   In this case  the letters are  ACELNOPST   Next step is to make another copy of the grid   And then to use the letters I ve just identified to replace each of those letters with a digit from 1 to 9   That s simple     tr ACELNOPST 0-9   The result is   8-5-----1 -2-----7- --08--4-3 ---4075-- ---2-8--- --7613--- 2-8--57-- -0-----6- 7-----1-8   This can then be solved in the usual way  or entered into any sudoku solver you might prefer   The completed solution can then be converted back into letters with    tr 1-9 ACELNOPST   There is power in vi that is matched by very few others   The biggest problem is that only a very few of the vi tutorial books  websites  help-files  etc   do more than barely touch the surface of what is possible

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Last week at work our project inherited a lot of Python code from another project   Unfortunately the code did not fit into our existing architecture - it was all done with global variables and functions  which would not work in a multi-threaded environment     We had  80 files that needed to be reworked to be object oriented - all the functions moved into classes  parameters changed  import statements added  etc   We had a list of about 20 types of fix that needed to be done to each file   I would estimate that doing it by hand one person could do maybe 2-4 per day   So I did the first one by hand and then wrote a vim script to automate the changes   Most of it was a list of vim commands e g     delete an un-needed function   g someFunction   d    add wibble parameter to function foo    s foo  foo  wibble      convert all function calls bar thing  into method calls thing bar     g bar   normal nmaf ldi  aPa    The last one deserves a bit of explanation   g bar    executes the following command on every line that contains  bar   normal   execute the following text as if it was typed in in normal mode n        goes to the next match of  bar    since the  g command leaves the cursor position at the start of the line  ma       saves the cursor position in mark a f        moves forward to the next opening bracket l        moves right one character  so the cursor is now inside the brackets di       delete all the text inside the brackets  a       go back to the position saved as mark a  i e  the first character of  bar   P        paste the deleted text before the current cursor position a        go into insert mode and add a        For a couple of more complex transformations such as generating all the import statements I embedded some python into the vim script   After a few hours of working on it I had a script that will do at least 95  of the conversion   I just open a file in vim then run  source fixit vim and the file is transformed in a blink of the eye   We still have the work of changing the remaining 5  that was not worth automating and of testing the results  but by spending a day writing this script I estimate we have saved weeks of work   Of course it would have been possible to automate this with a scripting language like Python or Ruby  but it would have taken far longer to write and would be less flexible - the last example would have been difficult since regex alone would not be able to handle nested brackets  e g  to convert bar foo xxx   to foo xxx  bar     Vim was perfect for the task

User · Answer

http   www viemu com a-why-vi-vim html is a good advocacy article   It explains the power of using the   command to repeat the last edit      Copy Cut  amp  paste  I do it all the   time  With all the classical editors   you press Shift with the left hand    and you move the cursor with your   right hand to select text  Then Ctrl C   copies  you move the cursor and Ctrl V   pastes       With Vim it s horrible     yy to copy one line  you almost never want the whole line      number xx yy to copy xx lines into the buffer  But you never know       exactly if you ve selected what you   wanted  I often have to do  number   xx dd then u to undo    I m sure the other answers have explained better  but You re Doing It Wrong   I often use visual mode to select text to yank or delete  which is similar to your shift   select example  but Vim has a clear advantage here because your hands never leave home row to do it    yy is a great command but I often do Vy instead if I want to yank a whole line

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You asked about productive shortcuts  but I think your real question is  Is vim worth it  The answer to this stackoverflow question is -   Yes   You must have noticed two things  Vim is powerful  and vim is hard to learn  Much of it s power lies in it s expandability and endless combination of commands  Don t feel overwhelmed  Go slow  One command  one plugin at a time  Don t overdo it    All that investment you put into vim will pay back a thousand fold  You re going to be inside a text editor for many  many hours before you die  Vim will be your companion

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Odd nobody s mentioned ctags  Download  exuberant ctags  and put it ahead of the crappy preinstalled version you already have in your search path  Cd to the root of whatever you re working on  for example the Android kernel distribution  Type  ctags -R    to build an index of  source files anywhere beneath that dir in a file named  tags   This contains all tags  nomatter the language nor where in the dir  in one file  so cross-language work is easy   Then open vim in that folder and read  help ctags for some commands  A few I use often    Put cursor on a method call and type CTRL-  to go to the method definition   Type  ta name to go to the definition of name

User · Answer

Repeat last text-changing command  I save a lot of time with this one   Visual mode was mentioned previously  but block visual mode has saved me a lot of time when editing fixed size columns in text file    accessed with Ctrl-V

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The Control R mechanism is very useful  -   In either insert mode or command mode  i e  on the   line when typing commands   continue with a numbered or named register    a - z the named registers   the unnamed register  containing the text of the last delete or yank   the current file name   the alternate file name   the clipboard contents  X11  primary selection    the clipboard contents   the last search pattern   the last command-line   the last inserted text - the last small  less than a line  delete  5 5 insert 25 into text  mini-calculator    See  help i CTRL-R and  help c CTRL-R for more details  and snoop around nearby for more CTRL-R goodness

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The series of vim commands ggVGg  applies a Rot13 cipher to the text in your current document     Gung vf zl zbfg cebqhpgvir fubegphg fvapr V nyjnlf glcr va Ebg13

[vim] What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?

Examples related to vim

Examples related to vi