Vim tips

Here’s a list of vim tips that I’ve learned over the years. I tried to put the ones I find the most useful or less known first.

• To cycle throught the delete registers, first type "1p and then you can cycle through the delete registers with u..

• You can use numbers to fetch the delete registers. For instance "1p will paste the last delete, "2p will paste the last but one…

• Put a count before a <action>i( to go at a parent level of parentheses. For instance, if you’re here:

Do 2di( to delete the content of the condition.

• Use the register + and * to access the system clipboard and selection. You need vim to be compiled with +clipboard for that to work or neovim + xclip.

• Use capital W (like diW instead of diw) in your actions to do it on every character connected to the current one instead of the "word".

• Use =% to indent a block of code.

• Type Ctrl-o <normal mode command> to execute a normal mode command in insert mode. (edit: added March 8th 2020)

• Use C-o (or C-i) to go back (or forward) in the jump history.

• Do '' (go to the mark ', which is an implicit mark) to go to the latest position in the jump history.

• You can search with word boundary by doing /\<word\>.

• Use f<char> to move to a character in the current line. It’s useful when combining with actions like df).

• In addition to the visual mode, there’s a line visual mode that you enable with Shift+v and a block visual mode that you enable with Ctrl+v. You can switch from one mode to the other without going back to normal mode by pressing the corresponding bindings.

• @@ executes the last executed macro.

• Use C-^ to go to the alternate (previous) file. (It’s very useful when you often need to toggle between two files you’re working on.)

• Use gv to recreate the last selection.

• Use C-] to navigate through a link in the help pages.

• Use gf to open the file with the name coming from the word under the cursor.

• Use { (or }) to go to the previous (next) blank line.

• Once you jump to a character on the same line with f<char>, you can jump to the next occurrence with ;.

• When you selected a block with vi{ you can select the outer block by typing i{ and you can do this as much as you want. (Sounds useful for lisp programmers.)

• Use :retab to convert the buffer to your setup for indentation. For instance, if you configured vim to have 4 spaces for indentation, it will convert the tabs to 4 spaces.

• Enable the relativenumber option to have relative line numbers. It makes it easier to do actions with a count prefix.

• In neovim, use the option set inccommand=split to get an incremental visual feedback when doing the substitude command.

• Move by visual line (instead of actual line) with gj and gk. If you prefer that way of moving, you can remap j and k to these.

• Use K on a word to open its manpage. Very useful when reading C code.

• You can hide all windows except the focused one with :only.

• You can hide a window with the :hide command.

• Increase (decrease) the size of a window with C-w + (C-w -). You can use the count before to specify how many lines (or columns) to increase/decrease at once.

• You can remove trailing spaces with the command :%s/\s\+$/.

• Pressing o in visual mode switches the cursor at the other end of the selection

• Pressing % in normal mode goes to the matching parens.

• To go to the end of the previous word, type ge.

• Use zt, zz or zb to respectively move the the view towards to the top, the center or the bottom.

• In addition to being able to do /search/e you can do /search/e+2 to go 2 characters after the end. It also works with - as in /search/e-2 and from the beginning with b like /search/b+2.

• _ can be used instead of ^ to go to the first non-blank character.

• Use = to indent your code. Most useful if combined with visual mode or with a count parameter before.

• In command or search mode, type Ctrl-r 0 to paste from the yank register. This also works in insert mode. (edit: completed on March 23th 2020)

• You can enable the option gdefault to have global substitute by default (all matches in a line will be substituted).

• Use the option scrolloff to keep a context of a certain number of lines when you scroll or move the cursor. For instance, with set scrolloff=3, vim will keep 3 lines visible below the cursor when you scroll down.

• Use C-a (C-x) to increment (decrement) the next number. It’s very useful in macros.

• 0 goes to the beginning of the line, but if you want to go to the first non-space character of the line, use ^.

• In normal mode, use C-e and C-y to move the view up and down.

• In visual mode, filter your selection with a shell command by typing !cmd. It’s useful to sort your file, for instance: V<move>!sort.

• You can have global marks (i.e. marks for other files than the current one) but using capital-letter marks (like mA).

• Map the leader key to some accessible key like space (let mapleader = "\<Space>") or comma and create bindings to be able to do common actions quicker like: nnoremap <Leader>w :w<CR>.

• You can create a session with :mksession <name> and reload that session later with :source <name>. There are many parameters to configure what goes into the session file.

• You can configure what you want to save in a session. For instance, if you only want to save the opened buffers and the current directory, use set sessionoptions=buffers,curdir.

• Quit vim by setting exit code with :cq. That is useful to exit the vim opened by git rebase to cancel the rebase, for instance.

• vit to select XML tags. And you can type it again to select the parent tag.

• _ is the black hole register. You can use it to delete stuff without overwriting a buffer as in "_dd.

• Enter the command :set spell to enable spell checking the the buffer. You can specify the language with :set spelllang=fr for french.

• You can repeat the last command entered with : by typing @: and the subsequent repeats can be done with @@.

• Add this option set matchpairs+=<:> to be able to use % to jump from < to >.

• In command or search mode, use the up arrow (or ctrl-p) to select the previous command.

• In insert mode, use C-e to type the same character as the line below and C-y to type the same character as the one above.

• You can open .gz files containing text in vim (seems to come from a built-in plugin). Also works for .tar files.

• If you want to scroll all your split windows at the same time, bind them together with: :windo set scrollbind.

• <C-g> show some info (less than g<C-g>) about the current file.

• If you want to save a read-only file (forget to open vim with sudo), use the following command: :w !sudo tee %