Antoyo's Blog

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:

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.

Use g; to go to a previous edit location, g, to go to the next one. The command :changes shows the list of changes, with a number for each that you can put in front of g; or g, to go to that specific change. (edit: added February 5th 2021)

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 %