Links: Vim
One of the key functions of Vim is that when using it you won’t ever need to touch a mouse. You may be used to the arrow keys, and you can also use them here, but when editing text quickly the best way to move around is with hjkl
hjkl is the Vim equivalent of the gamer’s wasd
┏━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ ↑ ┃
┃ k ┃
┃ ← h l → ┃
┃ j ┃
┃ ↓ ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━┛Vim divides the text in units, one unit could be a character, but it could also be a word or a line.
| unit | jump to start | jump to finish |
|---|---|---|
| word | b | e |
| line | 0 | $ |
| paragraph | { | } |
| file | gg | G |
| window | H | L |
For words we have a couple more commads that can be useful for more granular control.
| Key | Description |
|---|---|
| w | go to start of the next word |
| W | go to start of the next WORD |
| e | go to end of the next word |
| E | go to end of the next WORD |
| b | go to previous (back) word |
| B | go to previous (back) WORD |
The differences between a word and a WORD in Vim is that the first one can be separated by characters like . or -
A WORD will be limited only by whitespaces, so hello-world will be one WORD but two words
You can also move to the matching pair of (), {}. or [], by pressing %.
Related post
For moving to specific words or characters in the file check out Search in Vim