10 Vim Techniques for Novices

Since I switched to Vim as my primary editor back in March of this year, I have discovered a wealth of useful tricks that help me get things done. Most of these techniques are truly indispensable, and should find a place in any Vim user’s quiver.

I should also note that at this time, I’m nowhere near expert-level in my Vim abilities, so this post is intended to share some commands, patterns, and configurations with other Vim users who are still getting their feet wet with the editor.

Experienced Vimmers will already know all this stuff, and more power to them. This is for the Vim n00bs out there.

1. Open with Cursor at Last Edit Position

This one isn’t so much a technique as it is a preference. If you make a change to a file, and then re-open it later, the following snippet in your .vimrc will position the cursor at the last spot you made an edit prior to closing the buffer or Vim itself:

autocmd BufReadPost *
    \ if line("'\"") > 0 && line("'\"") <= line("$") |
    \   exe "normal! g`\"" |
    \ endif

2. Visual Block Mode

You might know about Visual mode v, and even Visual Line mode V, but do you know about Visual Block mode? You can enter it with <C-V> (that’s CTRL-V), and then use Vim movement commands to select text in a box of columns and rows, rather than by lines. This can allow you to make some really powerful edits.

Other editors, such as TextMate, can perform a similar blockwise selection using the Alt/Option key. Well, MacVim can do the same thing. Hold down Alt or Option, and click/drag with the mouse. I want to caution you against relying on this too much, though. Vim is designed to reward you for keeping your fingers on the keys as much as possible.

3. Quick Letter Swap

If I accidentally type “teh” instead of “the”, the natural reaction would be to go back, select those two letters, and retype them, but there’s a simple way to swap any two adjacent letters:

Move the cursor to the first letter of the swapped pair (in this example, the “e” of “teh”) and type xp. This cuts the character the cursor is on, and immediately pastes it after the next.

4. Repeat Last Edit (the magic dot)

The glorious . is a very powerful command, and probably my most-often used in this list. Typing . in normal mode repeats your most recent edit. It’s dead simple to use, and just plain awesome in so many contexts.

5. Move and Edit by Text Object

At the root of Vim’s idiosyncratic design is a variety of ways to easily move around a text file and edit it effortlessly:

w and b move the cursor forward and backward by word.
( and ) move the cursor forward and backward by sentence.
{ and } move the cursor forward and backward by paragraph.

You can combine text objects with counts and actions to perform very powerful, concise edits.

One of my favorite commands is ciw, and the pnemonic for it is Change Inside Word. If I can get my cursor anywhere in a word, it doesn’t matter which character it’s on, a quick ciw will cut the whole word and change to insert mode so I can enter new text in its place. No awkward text selection or repetitive deletion keying. Just ciw and type the new word.

6. Delete, Yank, and Paste a Line

dd will “delete” a line, which is the same as cut.
yy will “yank” a line, which is the same as copy.
p will paste at the line below the cursor.
P (SHIFT-p) will paste at the line above the cursor.

Any of these commands can be preceded by a numeric count: 10p will paste 10 times.

7. Easy Repeated Characters

Say I am working in Markdown format – which I often am; these blog posts are is written that way – and I want to use an underline-style H2:

This is my heading
==================

I would prefer not to have to type who-knows-how-many equals signs in a row. How annoying. Luckily, something like this is dead simple in Vim.

After typing your header, exit to normal mode and, with your cursor still on the line, type yyp to duplicate the line. The text now looks like this:

This is my heading
This is my heading

At this point, your cursor should on the first character of the second line. Type v$r= to visually select the text to the end of the line, and replace all the characters with equals signs. That’s it: the full command is yypv$r=

Update: Honza Pokorny pointed out a shorter alternative to this command: YpVr=

Update 2: Santosh Kumar observed that V may not be able to replace v$ in every situation, particularly if there is whitespace at the beginning of the line.

If you ever just want 80 stars in a row, say, to section off a part of source code, you could just type 80i*<Esc> – easy.

8. Quick Find

/ will switch to a mode that allows you to enter a search string for the current buffer. If you have the proper settings in your .vimrc,

Vim will even do an incremental search. When you have the search term you want, hit <Enter> and cycle forward through the search results in the buffer with n, and backwards with N.

? does the same thing as /, only in the reverse direction. You can also use * to quick-search the word your cursor is currently on.

For some sane defaults, here are some of my .vimrc search settings:

set hlsearch   " Highlight search matches
set incsearch  " Highlight matches as you type
set ignorecase " Case-insensitive searching
set smartcase  " ...but case-sensitive if expression has caps
set wrapscan   " Set the search scan to wrap around the file

" Press space bar to turn off search highlighting
" and clear any message displayed
nnoremap <silent> <Space> :nohl<Bar>:echo<CR>

9. Search & Replace in a Buffer

Few of us can really consider ourselves experts with regular expressions, but if you have ever used them for any kind of text processing task, you realize how incredibly powerful (and yes, sometimes befuddling) they can be. Regexes are used in Vim’s native search and replace.

It is necessary to specify a range when doing a search and replace, and generally, you will want the action to be global, so you would type :%s/pattern/replacement/g and hit <Enter>. Done. The % represents the entire buffer, while the s///g structure is the standard search and replace command syntax.

To search/replace within a given selection, first select your desired range in visual mode, then hit :. Vim will pre-fill your range as '<,'>, which means the current selection. Use the same s///g syntax as before to restrict the action to the selection you specified.

The trailing /g? That’s an option that I usually like to pass, as it tells Vim to replace all matches, not just the first one.

10. Project Search & Replace

It’s a common complaint: project search & replace – an operation that spans one or more files – is one of the few glaring weaknesses of Vim. Until there is better support for this feature in Vim itself, it is possible to pull off in an unorthodox way: don’t use Vim! Try this on for size (from the command line):

$ sed -i 's/pattern/replacement/' <files>

From within Vim, while in : command mode, you can use the same command, only beginning with a !. This pipes the command directly to a shell session and does the business. Note the relative consistency of sed’s search & replace syntax with Vim’s native one.

Passing commands from Vim to external programs is common, and often encouraged. Select some text and run the :sort command on it sometime – it actually calls the external sort program, which passes the sorted lines back to Vim.

My dotvim

I wouldn’t consider my Vim configuration to be anything special, but it’s mine, and I am always tweaking it (you Vim people know what I’m talking about). If you are curious about what I might have in there, you can feel free have a look at it – it’s on GitHub, of course, and all the plugins are set up as Git submodules with Pathogen.

Dive into Vim!

The nuts and bolts of how to use Vim are, of course, outside the scope of this article. VimCasts, PeepCode, and Vim’s built-in tutorial are at your disposal. That being said, I’m willing to attempt to answer most questions you might have about Vim, either on Twitter or via the comments.