VIM commands

Help

• :help  -  vim help
• :help commandname - help on a particular command
• CTRL+] - jump to a highlighted topic
• CTRL+T - jump backwards

Motion

• :help left-right-motion
• j,k move up down
• h,l move left right
• b,w move previous or next word
• ctrl+b, ctrl+d move page up or page down

Undo redo

• u: undo last change (can be repeated to undo preceding commands)
• Ctrl-R: Redo changes which were undone (undo the undos). 
• Compare to '.' to repeat a previous change, at the current cursor position. Ctrl-R will redo a previously undone change, wherever the change occurred. 

Switch between navigation and editing mode

• A - move to the end of the line and switch to editing mode 
• I - switch to editing mode at the current place
• Escape - switch to navigation mode
• alt+h alt+j alt+k alt+l - switch to navigation mode and move
• alt+: - switch to navigation mode and send a command

Search and replace characters

• "/" to search, then n forward and N backwards
• "*" to search for the word under the cursor (you can also create a mapping to search for a selected text)

Vim wiki on search and replace 

• :s/foo/bar/g Find each occurrence of 'foo' (in the current line only), and replace it with 'bar'. 

• :%s/foo/bar/g Find each occurrence of 'foo' (in all lines), and replace it with 'bar'.

• %s/option value=".*"//g remove all beginnings of line. :%s/\option\n/, /g replace all end of line by comma + space. This cleans an html list of species for inclusion in a text.

Markdown

Display a list of first level header in a markdown document (found in quick markdown navigation/TOC)

:g/^# /#

Then enter the line number to jump to that line.

Line numbers

 Display line numbers

:set nu

Disable line numbers

:set nonu

Editing a whole line

• dd to delete a whole line
• yy to copy a whole line
• p to paste the copied or deleted text after the current line or 
• P to paste the copied or deleted text before the current line 

Copy, cut and paste

• Position the cursor where you want to begin cutting.
• Press v (or upper case V if you want to cut whole lines).
• Move the cursor to the end of what you want to cut.
• Press d to cut or y to copy.
• Move to where you would like to paste.
• Press P to paste before the cursor, or p to paste after. 

Indentation

Indentation replaced by spaces, add this to the ~/.vimrc file

set tabstop=4
set expandtab
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
filetype indent on 

More details on vim indentation in the python wiki.

Multiple files and windows

• :e filename - edit another file 
• :ls         - show current buffers
• :b 2        - open buffer #2 in this window
• :b filename - open buffer #filename in this window
• :bd         - close the current buffer (! to forget changes)
• :bd filename -close a buffer by name 

Windows

• :sp[lit] filename  - split window and load another file
• :vs[plit] - same but split vertically  
• ctrl-w up arrow - move cursor up a window
• ctrl-w ctrl-w   - move cursor to another window (cycle)
• ctrl-w_         - maximize current window
• ctrl-w=         - make all equal size
• CTRL+z - suspend the process and get back to the shell
• fg - get back to vim

Vimdiff

View differences between file1 and file2 (vim documentation)

vimdiff file1 file2

spell check

Set spell check only in the local buffer:

:setlocal spell spelllang=en_gb  

 Turn spell check off

:set nospell

Mark word as correct, this creates a spell file under /home/user/.vim/spell:

zg

Mark word as incorrect

zw

Plugins for programming languages

• Vim R
• Vim on Python wiki (set softtabstop=4) or your  python development environment (set tabstop=4 and set softtabstop=4)

.vimrc

Text colour.
Add syntax highlight to your .vimrc

syntax enable

How to add a file extension to vim syntax highlight

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.dump set filetype=sql

I used it to display markdown files as text files:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.md set filetype=txt