Vim Cheat Sheet 🤓

Vim Cheat Sheet, useful commands compatible with VSCodeVim for Microsoft Visual Studio Code.

Introduction

In this document, I'll share with you my Vim learnings, listing everyday commands, nouns, and movements I found useful to be more productive in everyday coding. Vim is a powerful text editor, this document is not exhaustive.

Vim as Language

Vim commands are formed from a combination of verbs and targets. The targets could be objects (words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, the contents of parentheses) or movements (jump to the end of a word, jump to end of the paragraph, jump forward until the letter ‘e’, etc). Forming objects generally involves the use of a modifier. You can also add a count to perform the action count times.

Commands

v	visual
c	change
d	delete (remove from the document and put in buffer)
dd	delete current line
y	yank/copy
yy	yank/copy the line)
i	enter insert mode
I	enter insert mode at the beginning of the line
v	enter visual mode
V	enter visual line (selects the current line in one keystroke)
p	paste the buffer after the cursor
P	paste the buffer before the cursor
r[char]	replace the character under the cursor [char]
s	delete the character under the curser and puts you into insert mode
x	delete the character under the cursor
u	undo the last command
a	append and enter insert mode after the carat
A	append to line (enter insert mode at the end of the line)
o	open a line after the current one and enter insert mode
O	open a line before the current one and enter insert mode

Modifiers

i	inside
a	around
t	till... finds a character
f[char]	find... like till except including the [char]
/	search...find a string/regex

Targets (Text objects)

w	word
s	sentence
p	paragraph
b	block/parentheses
t	tag, works for html/xm

Nouns/Movements

Nouns or movements are commands for moving within the document or representing an area within a document.

h, j, k, l	move, equivalent to the arrow keys left, down, up, right
H	move to the top of screen
M	move to the middle of screen
L	move to the bottom of screen
zz	scroll the line with the cursor to the center of the screen
zt	scroll the line with the cursor to the top
zb	scroll the line with the cursor to the bottom
Ctrl-D	move half-page down
Ctrl-U	move half-page up
Ctrl-B	page up
Ctrl-F	page down
0	move to the very beginning of the current line
^	move to the first non-whitespace character on the line
$	move to the end of the line
w, b	move to the next/previous word
W, B	as w/b only Words are bigger
), (	move to the next/previous sentence
}, {	move to the next/previous paragraph
/[regexp]	like t but instead of finding a character, it finds a regexp
%	jump to the matching parenthesis (vim understands nested parenthesis)
_	move to the current line (useful for making commands line-based)
#[char]	jump to the previous instance of the word under [char]
>>	indent line
<<	outdent line
*[char]	jump to the next instance of the word under [char]
ddp / ddkP	are common commands to move a line one down / up

Useful

vi[char]	visualize all content inside that [char] excluding delimiter
va[char]	visualize all content inside that [char] including delimiter
vi{	select all content inside curly braces excluding braces
va{	select all content inside curly braces including braces
viw	select world under the cursor
vit	visually select text in a tag
vat	visually select text around a tag
vap	visually select paragraph under cursor
gc	toggles line comment, example gcc to toggle line comment for the current line and gc2j to toggle line comments for the current line and the next line
gC	toggles block comment, example gCi to comment out everything within parenthesis
ciw	change inner word will change the whole word under the cursor
cw	change the word from the current cursor position
/	enter regex search mode
n	find the next instance of the search term
N	find the previous instance of the search term
.	repeat last change (extremely powerful)
^ or 0	move to the beginning of the line
Shift+0	move to the end of the line
Shift+i	move to the beginning of the line and switch to insert mode
Ctrl-R	redo the last undo (sidenote: in vim undo/redo forms a tree, changes aren’t lost)
Ctrl-[	exit insert mode
Ctrl-c	exit insert mode
Ctrl-ww	window switching

Registers

Registers in Vim let you run actions or commands on text stored within them. To access a register, you type a before a command, where a is the name of a register. Please, note some of these commands are not supported by VSCodeVim yet.

:reg	access all currently defined registers
"kyy	copy the current line into register k
"Kyy	append to a register by using a capital letter
"kp	paste value of the register
"+p	paste from system clipboard on Linux
"*p	paste from system clipboard on Windows (or from "mouse highlight" clipboard on Linux)

Others

dat	delete the current tag (and all its content)
f[char]	find character and move cursor at position [char]
t[car]	find character and move cursor at one position before [char]
vi[	visual select inside [
i[car]	expand selection to that [char], similar including a[char]
gt	move the cursor to next tab
gT	move the cursor to prior tab
nnngt	numbered tab
:tabonly	close all tabs and keep open only the focused one
:split	split into two windows, top half and bottom half
:sp	same as :split
:vsplit	split into two windows, left and right
:vsp	same as :vsplit
:sp	spit current document in two horizontally
:vs	spit current document in two vertically
Ctrl-y	move the screen up one line
Ctrl-e	move the screen down one line
Ctrl-u	move cursor & screen up ½ page
Ctrl-d	move cursor & screen down ½ page
Ctrl-b	move the screen up one page, cursor to the last line
Ctrl-f	move the screen down one page, cursor to the first line
Ctrl-y	only change the cursor position if it would be moved off-screen, same as Ctrl-e
zt	move current line to the top of the screen
zb	move current line to the bottom of the screen
t	till, example dt. (delete till dot) or df.(delete till dot included)
CTRL-O	retrace your movements in file in backward
CTRL-I	retrace your movements in file in forwards
J	joins the line the cursor is on with the line below
viwp	visual select inner word and paste (change a selected word using current buffer )

Deleting

dw	delete from the current cursor position to the beginning of the next word character
d$	delete from the current cursor position to the end of the current line
D	as d$
dtX	delete forward up to character X
dfX	delete forward through character X
dTX	delete backward up to character X
dFX	delete backward through character X
:%d	delete all content of the document

Change case

~	changes the case of current character
guu	change the current line from upper to lower
gUU	change the current line from lower to upper
guw	change to the end of current word from upper to lower
guaw	change all of the current word to lower.
gUw	change to the end of the current word from lower to upper
gUaw	change all of the current word to upper
g~~	invert case to entire line
guG	change to lowercase until the end of document

Notes

1. The quickest way to retrace your movements is to hit either: two apostrophes or two backticks. The difference is that the backtick goes to the same location on the line, whereas the apostrophe goes to the start of the line. There are loads of useful marks like this, see :help mark-motions.

2. Move to the end of the line in normal mode in VIM: Jump to last nonblank g_ or use $ which moves to the last character on the line.

3. You can use Ctrl-W direction to switch windows (where direction is one of the normal hjkl cursor movement keys, or the arrow keys).

4. The focus is on the new split initially. To move between splits first press Ctrl-w.

Interesting resources

Using marks

Vim + Tmux

Mastering the Vim Language

All the right moves

Graphical cheat sheet