I have been using vim for a long time as my favorite text editor but havent gone through its introductory tutorial

vimtutor

Check it out, good stuff there. However, it’s really a small subset from what Vim can do. There is also extensive help when you excute the command :help from within Vim. Check out :h quickref for a quick reference, :h index for the complete list of commands. I recommend this three part series.

Notable features

Basics

Vim has differet modes: Normal, Insert, and Visual modes. Unless otherwise stated, the following commmands all run in normal mode.

Terminology

  • A buffer is the in-memory text of a file.
  • A window is a viewport on a buffer.
  • A tab page is a collection of windows.

This will help you browse large files

  • Page up CTRL-U
  • Page down CTRL-D

Splitting Windows

  • To split horizontally :split
  • To split vertically :vsplit

These two commands show two views of the same file when used without an argument. Just add the filename you want if you’d like to see it side by side

:vs filename

I used the abbreviated form of :vsplit. To close windows :close

To navigate through split windows,

CTRL-W + navigation keys

To close all other windows CTRL-W + o.

Tab page

You can open tabpages instead. As follows:

tabnew filename

See :h tabpage for more info.

Visual mode

I will give an example of moving text around within a file.

  1. Press v to enter visual mode
  2. Highlight the text using navigation keys
  3. Press d to delete it (it would would move it to a register)
  4. Move the cursor to where you want to put it, and press p.

Numbering lists

Using commands, you can do the following:

command! -nargs=0 -range=% Number <line1>,<line2>s/^\s*\zs/\=(line('.') - <line1>+1).'. '

Put this in your .vimrc.

Visual blocks

This is a nice feature to have to copy visual columns from a list, stored as a text file or printed to the screen. Use CTRL-V.

Registers

:dis to see what’s in the registers. You can use this as follows: the register ": contains the value of the last entered command, so press ":p to display the last entered command on the text file.

Moving lines

Place the cursor on a line then use

:m10

to move it to the 10th line. To display line numbers,

:set number

and use :set nonumber to undo this.

Putting text

The following puts ‘hi’ on the first line.

:0put='hi'

The put command puts things after the specified line number.

In normal mode, point at a filename such as ~/.vimrc, then press gf. It will take you to that file (everything needs to be saved first).

Removing Control Characters

Read about it here

:%s/^V^M//g

Making a list of numbers

You can do this with

:put=range(1,5)

See more about this here. You can also use python’s range function

:r !python -c "print([k for k in range(10)])"
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

This is good for quick calculations. You can also use bc if you have it:

Quick calculations

Similar to the above, you can do

:r !echo 12+12/13+2*8|bc -l
28.92307692307692307692

Or ruby (which doesn’t need to import functions like python),

:r !ruby -e 'puts(Math.exp(1))'
2.718281828459045

More Vim tricks

This one matches around a pattern

\zs.*\ze

jump lists, change lists,

ctrl e, ctrl y

browsing the change list

g;
g,

Delete in parenthesis

di(

Nice plugins

The following plugins are of interest for programmers

  • NERDTree, to display the file tree
  • Taglist, good for browsing through tags
  • Ultisnip, for auto completion