VIM tips & tricks

Moving around

Going back and forth

If we consider a word to be any sequence of letters, numbers and the underscore character, we may navigate between words using these commands:

Command	Effect
e	Go to the end of the word
b	Go to the beginning of the word

This is not ideal when working with code, where we often want to skip special characters and not only words as defined above. If we define WORDS to be sequences of characters delimieted by whitespace, we can use the following commands to move between these:

Command	Effect
E	Go to the end of the WORD
B	Go to the beginning of the WORD

Command	Effect
^	Go to the first non-whitespace character of the line
$	Go to the last character of the line
A	Go to the last character of the line and enter INSERT mode

Editing

Deleting text

Command	Effect
dd	Delete current line
dt.	Delete from current position until (not including) next . (on current line only)
df.	Delete from current position until (and including) next . (on current line only)

Copying and pasting

Command	Effect
yt.	Yank (copy) from current position until but not including next .
yf.	Yank (copy) from current position until and including next .

Layout

Wrapping lines

To automatically wrap lines at column 80, set textwidth to 80:

:set textwidth=80

This will make lines wrap as you type them. To format existing text according to the new textwidth, select the text and type gq.

Coloured guide line

To highlight column 80, set colorcolumn to 80 (or use the shorthand cc):

:set cc=80

Visual Block Mode

Visual block mode allows you to edit a consecutive set of lines in one go. You enter Visual Block Mode, select a number of consecutive lines, perform the desired operation and then, when you hit ESC, the operation is performed on all the selected lines.

You enter Visual Block Mode by pressing C-q. Once in Visual Block Mode, you may select the lines to affect using the usual h, j, k, and l keys. Next, press I to place the cursor before the first selection and change to insert mode. You are now ready to insert something at the front of each line. Alternatively, press A to move the curser to the end of the line and change to insert mode, getting ready to append something to each line. Type whatever you want to insert. When you hit ESC, your changes will be performed on each selected line.

An aside: Visual Block Mode on Windows

On linux, you enter Visual Block Mode by pressing C-v. However, this key combination is used for pasting text on Windows, so VIM offers an alternative, C-q.

There is another caveat, though: C-q has a special meaning in some terminals, so if you run VIM in a terminal, the terminal may catch the C-q key combination. Thus, to be able to enter Visual Block Mode on Windows while running VIM in a terminal, you will have to unset this behaviour of your terminal. If you are running bash, you may do this by putting

stty start undef

in your .bashrc file.

Tags

To create a tags file run

ctags -R .

on the command line at the top of your project. Now, when using Vim, you may use C-] to go to the definition of a symbol.

Diffing with VIM

To diff two files using VIM, start VIM with the -d option:

vim -d file1 file2

Windows

Opening and closing windows:

Command	Effect
<C-w>s	Split current window horizontally (then use :e <filename> to open new file)
<C-w>v	Split current window vertically (then use :e <filename> to open new file)
:clo	Close window

Navigating between windows:

Command	Effect
<C-w>w	Cycle between windows
<C-w>h	Go to window to the left
<C-w>j	Go to window below
<C-w>k	Go to window above
<C-w>l	Go to window to the right

Controlling windows:

Command	Effect
<C-w>=	Make windows of equal height and width
<C-w>_	Maximize height of current window
<C-w>|	Maximize width of current window
N<C-w>_	Set height of current window to N
N<C-w>|	Set width of current window to N
<C-w>H	Move window left
<C-w>J	Move window down
<C-w>K	Move window up
<C-w>L	Move window right