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The number of vi/vim commands is relative to your age (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by allywilson@lemmy.ml to c/linuxhumor@lemmy.ml

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I've noticed that people older than me have always known just a few more vi commands than I do.

I'm in my 40s, so clearly I know about 4:

Writes and quits (I consider these variants of the same thing):

:w
:q
:q!
:wq
ZZ

See the line numbers: :set number

Delete everything from top to bottom (must be at top, easily remembered by mumbling duck, duck, duck, GOOSE): :dddG

Search for a string: /

And that's probably it. I think I used to know how to cut a line and paste a line, but I'd have to look it up to be 100% correct on the syntax.

Anyone in their 50s or 60s care to add to this dazzlingly long list of inadequacy? Not looking for a cheat sheet or the man page :-p

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[–] Farnsworth@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Very useful for renaming a variable: * to search "word" under cursor. Try this with hlsearch on::set hlsearch. Then cw to change a match. Alternate n and . to quickly rename more occurrences of the word. Do a :noh to get rid of the highlighting. Maybe try :set noinc, some people prefer the traditional "non-incremental" search.

Do all this in normal mode. Vim experts leave insert mode as soon as possible. Almost forgot: Pressing C-c takes you back to normal mode without leaving home row.

Most important advice: Never touch arrow keys. Keep your fingers on the home row. Learn hjkl movement (focus on j and k, they are more important). Then get faster by using b, w, f, o, O, A, I, C-d and all the rest. Learn about J, it's cool. You won't get far without u and C-r though.

Critically important advice for fellow Europeans: If you care about vim, consider learning the US keyboard layout. Default bindings are not convenient in other layouts like qwertz (where is forward slash on qwertz? Hello?), and learning US layout might be easier than learning to customize vim. On a typical modern Linux system, there are US layout variants that still allow typing Umlauts, like EurKey or "DE-US", where you type ä by pressing RightAlt+a, for example.