15 Vim shortcuts that will make your life easier

#linux #cloud #opensource #vim

Introduction

If you ever installed Linux in your life, I'm sure you might have come across Vim.

Vim is a command-line based text editor. It's a great tool but I won't say that it's the best text editor in Linux as it would lead to a never-ending debate.

Vim is actually an improved version of the old vi editor. It comes with many new features including multi-level undo, multiple window support, visual mode and command-line completion.

If you're using it for the first time, you may have hard time trying to exit Vim.
.
.
.
What? Don't you believe me?

Here's the proof :

In this blog, I'll list down 15 shortcuts that will save you a lot of time while working with vim.

Shortcut key	Function
w	To `move forward` by one word(you need to be in normal mode).
b	To `move backward` by one word(you need to be in normal mode).
gg	To `move to the beginning` of the file.
G	To `move to the end` of the file(last line).
dw	To `delete the word`, cursor is positioned upon.
dd	To `delete the line`, cursor is positioned upon.
d2d	To `delete 2 lines`, starting from the line, the cursor is upon. You can replace '2' by any number and delete any number of lines.
u	To `undo` the last operation performed.
Ctrl+r	To `redo` the last operation performed.
/sample_text	To `search` for the 'sample_text' in the file. Use `n` to move to next occurrence and `N` to move to the previous occurrence of the text(in Command mode).
:%s/old/new/g	`Replaces` all the occurrences of the `old` text with `new` text(in Command mode).
:q!	To `quit the file discarding all the changes` made to the file(in Command mode).
:wq	To `save the file` and `quit`(in Command mode).
:w sample_filename	To `save` the file with filename 'sample_filename'(in Command mode).
:q	To `quit` Vim. It fails when changes has been made to file(in Command mode).

That's all for the blog. I hope you had good time reading the blog!😃

Top comments (9)

Ben Sinclair • May 22 '22

I think some of these are slightly wrong:

w and b move forwards and backwards in normal mode, not command mode. In command mode, you have the little : prompt and can enter instructions for the editor to execute.

dw deletes from the cursor to the start of the next "word". To delete the word you're currently on, you'd use diw, daw, diW, or daW depending on exactly how you wanted to do it.

:%s/old/new will replace "old" with "new" in every line of the file, but it will only replace the first occurence of "old" in each line. If you want to replace every occurence, you'd pass the g flag like so: :%s/old/new/g

Your :w example suggests that it will use the filename "sample_filename" but you haven't put that in the command. It'd need to be :w sample_filename for that to work!