Essential developer skills: common Vim commands

Vim is a common editor on servers, so most developers eventually need to work with it. When I first encountered it, I was completely lost. Even after learning a few basics, many commands still felt unfamiliar. This post collects useful operations for future reference.

Cursor movement:

h: left
j: down
k: up
l: right

The commands below are especially useful and worth memorizing:

w: move to the start of the next word
b: move to the start of the previous word
gg: jump to the start of the file
G: jump to the end of the file
0: jump to the start of the line
$: jump to the end of the line

Numbers can be combined with commands to move quickly to a specific position. For example:

50G: jump to line 50
20j: move down 20 lines

Knowing how to move the cursor efficiently covers most day-to-day Vim use.

Search

/text: search forward for text
n: go to the next match
N: go to the previous match

In command mode, type a slash followed by the text to search for it. Then use n for the next result and N for the previous one.

Copying and deleting

yy: copy a line
dd: delete a line

Prefix a command with a number to operate on that many lines. For example:

100dd: delete 100 lines

In practice, I sometimes use gg followed by 10000dd to delete an entire file.

Undo

u: undo the last operation

Paging

Ctrl + f: page down
Ctrl + b: page up

A few handy tricks

Ctrl + z: suspend Vim; type fg in the shell to return
zt: place the current line at the top of the screen
zb: place the current line at the bottom of the screen
zz: center the current line on the screen

March 3, 2024, in Suzhou