VIM: Code Editor

Starting with Vim feels scary and it is, considering the fact that my typing speed went down quite drastically because i was not used to vim, but now that i’m getting a hang of it, it almost feels like it is saving me a bunch of clicks and it’s doing what it is supposed to be doing, helping me use mouse a lot less! Following are the list of things I have been using:

Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash

I have an added an extension vim to enable vim in Visual Studio Code because It is after all the best code editor you can find.

Movement:

• hjkl map to left, down, up and right
• w move cursor to the start of the next word
• b move cursor to the end of the last word (Go back)
• e move cursor to the end of the current word
• ^ move cursor to the first non empty character on the line
• $ move cursor to the last non empty character on the line
• gg to move to the start of the file
• G to move to the end of the current file
• % to move to matching opening/closing of nearest bracket. (Quite handy in visual mode for clearing a whole code block.)

Using/combining w, b, e, ^, $, % with d, c or visual mode will make your life easy.

Modes:

• editing mode: iIaA
• command mode: :
• visual mode: vV
• i to start editing to left where the cursor is
• a to start editing to right where the cursor is
• A to move the cursor to the end of the current line and start editing
• I to move the cursor to the start of the line and start editing
• V to switch to visual mode and highlight the current line

Editing:

• dd to cut the current line
• yy to copy the current line
• p to paste the content stored in the copy register
• o to create a new line after the current line and switch to editing
• O to create a new line before the current line and switch to editing
• x to delete the current character
• r<replace-with-character> to replace the current character with the <replace-with-character>
• c acts like d but switches to editing after the command executes
• d<modifier> to cut according to the modifier. i.e. de cut from the current position to the end of the current word.
• ctrl+a to increment a value in normal mode
• ctrl+x to decrement a value in normal mode

Prefixing a number before the command will repeat the command given number of times. For example, 5+ctrl+a will increment the number 5 times, so if it was 6, it will become 11.

Searching:

• / for regex powered search
• ENTER to search
• n to move to next search result
• N to move to previous search result

My favorites:

• :set relativenumber to display relative line numbers for easy navigation