Skip to main content

Vim Cheatsheet

Mandatory get out of Vim joke

Ughhh how do I escape Vim?

# <ESC> :wq, write the changes to the file and quit
# <ESC> :q, quit if there is no changes
# <ESC> :q!, quit without saving
Basics
             ^
             k              Hint:  The h key is at the left and moves left.
       < h       l >               The l key is at the right and moves right.
             j                     The j key looks like a down arrow.
             v

This is how you would be moving your cursors around in the file

They can be preceeded by a number to tell how many lines to say go down or go to the left.

For example: Pressing 10 and then h will move your cursors to the left 10 characters.

Command
 Description
x

Delete the character at the cursor
i, a, A
 Insert character at the cursor, insert character after the cursor (append), and append to the end of the line respectively.
<ESC>
 Put you into normal mode if you're in insertion mode, replace mode, or other modes
w, e, b
 Use it to traverse skip through each word to the start of each other, or to the end of each word. Use b to go back a word.

dw, de, d$, dd

 

Delete from cursor up to the next word

Delete from cursor up to the end of the word only

Delete from cursor to the end of the line

Delete the entire line regardless where your cursor is
operator [number] motion

Operator such as d can be specified together with a number to tell it how many times to repeat the motion.

Motion tells which text to operate on, w, e, $
u, U, CTRL-R

Undo previous action

Undo all the changes on the current line

Redo, (undo the undo)
p
 Paste what was deleted with the d operator
rx, R

Replace the current character with x, where x can be any character

Enter in replace mode where every character you type will be replacing the one that's on the cursor.
CTRL-G

Display current line number
G, <NUMBER> G

Move to the end of the file

Move to the line number specified
gg

Move to the first line of the file

/, ?

n, N

CTRL-o, CTRL-i

Used for searching patters forward and backward respectively

Used to find the next occurrence of the pattern in the direction specified, N is used to find the previous occurrence.

CTRL-o, CTRL-i take you back to the older/newer position so you don't have to scroll back to where you are respectively
%

Used to find the matching ( ), [ ], { }
:!command

Will execute external command, like ls
:w FILENAME

Write the current Vim file to another file called FILENAME
v

Visual mode, let you see what you are highlighting and then you can apply other operator such as deleting the highlighted text.
:r FILENAME

Read in the specified file and then paste it below the cursor

Can be used together with command to paste the output of the command. :r !ls
Some more command
Command
 Description
o, O
 To insert a empty line below and above the current line
y
 Copies text, yy copies the entire line. Can be used together with v to highlight a good section of the file and then paste it with p
CTRL-W CTRL-W
 To jump to another opened window
:terminal
 Open up a terminal within Vim this is pretty cool
Set command

Some settings in Vim can be changed for example if you want to show line numbers you can do :set number to toggle on displaying the line number on the side.

You can toggle it off by prepending a no to the original toggle, for example :set nonumber will disable displaying the line number on the side.

No Comments
Back to top