15 Vim shortcuts that will make your life easier

Sneh Chauhan - May 22 '22 - - Dev Community

Introduction

If you ever installed Linux in your life, I'm sure you might have come across Vim.

Vim is a command-line based text editor. It's a great tool but I won't say that it's the best text editor in Linux as it would lead to a never-ending debate.

Vim is actually an improved version of the old vi editor. It comes with many new features including multi-level undo, multiple window support, visual mode and command-line completion.

If you're using it for the first time, you may have hard time trying to exit Vim.
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What? Don't you believe me?

Here's the proof :

In this blog, I'll list down 15 shortcuts that will save you a lot of time while working with vim.

Shortcut key Function
w To move forward by one word(you need to be in normal mode).
b To move backward by one word(you need to be in normal mode).
gg To move to the beginning of the file.
G To move to the end of the file(last line).
dw To delete the word, cursor is positioned upon.
dd To delete the line, cursor is positioned upon.
d2d To delete 2 lines, starting from the line, the cursor is upon.
You can replace '2' by any number and delete any number of lines.
u To undo the last operation performed.
Ctrl+r To redo the last operation performed.
/sample_text To search for the 'sample_text' in the file. Use n to move to next occurrence and N to move to the previous occurrence of the text(in Command mode).
:%s/old/new/g Replaces all the occurrences of the old text with new text(in Command mode).
:q! To quit the file discarding all the changes made to the file(in Command mode).
:wq To save the file and quit(in Command mode).
:w sample_filename To save the file with filename 'sample_filename'(in Command mode).
:q To quit Vim. It fails when changes has been made to file(in Command mode).

That's all for the blog. I hope you had good time reading the blog!๐Ÿ˜ƒ

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