Unleash the power of Vim

Helpful commands to ease your text-editing process

What is Vim?

• A free text editor for writing code

• Useful when you have to navigate around the screen with your keyboard instead of a mouse

• Popular among engineers

Why Vim?

• Because why not? 😛

• Easier to perform these tasks efficiently -

  • edit files

  • navigate among text inside a file

  • and much more…

When is Vim most useful?

• When you can’t use GUI to navigate around, and thus bound to use only command line to perform operations

• Example -

  • Consider a scenario that you are using an Amazon EC2 instance (i.e. a remote machine).

  • Now, you have pulled in few repositories (repo) from GitHub, and you want to make few changes in these repo’s files.

  • You can’t use a GUI based code editor (like VS Code, Sublime, etc) - your only option to interact with these files is to use command line.

  • This is where Vim comes to help.

FYI, there are 3 modes in Vim:

• Normal → The first mode after entering into Vim. You can navigate around the text.

• Insert → While in normal mode, if we hit “i” key, we enter into this mode. We can add/edit text.

• Command-line → Can enter commands like “:q!”, “:wq“, etc.

Helpful commands of Vim

1. Open a file using vim »»» vim blog.txt

2. Keys to navigate in normal mode:

   1. Move one word forward »»» shift + w

   2. Move one word backward »»» shift + b

   3. Move to the beginning of a line »»» shift + 6

   4. Move to the end of a line »»» shift + 4

   5. Jump to the top of the file »»» :1

   6. Jump to the end of the file »»» :$

3. To check the file status (how many total lines, which line/which column) »»» control + g

4. To enable the ruler (shows lines and columns) »»» :set ruler

5. Delete a text:

   1. Delete character by character (keep cursor at the beginning of word) »»» x

   2. Delete the whole line (keep cursor at the beginning of line) »»» shift + d

6. Cut and paste a line:

   1. to cut »»» dd

   2. to paste »»» p

7. Search a word »»» /{word} + n

8. To quit the file:

   1. without saving your changes »»» :q!

   2. with your saved changes »»» :wq

There you go. Go nuts! 🤘

Credits: Got to learn about these vim commands from a nice online course which I took on Udemy by Jason Cannon on “Vim Masterclass“.