Vim Cheatsheet: Beyond the Basics Link to heading
Registers Link to heading
When we delete something with vim, the previous 9 deletions are saved in an unnamed register. We can access these registers with numbers from 1 to 9. For example:
"nP Paste the register n, n from 1 to 9, before the cursor
"np Paste the register n, n from 1 to 9, after the cursor
On the other hand, one can use named registers. Vim has 26 of them: The letters from a to z. For example, using the register t, we have
"tyy Yank the current line to the register labeled by t
"t5yy Yank the next five lines to the register labeled by t
"tP Paste the content of the register t before the cursor
"tp Paste the content of the register t after the cursor
One can also delete and save the deletion to a register as
"tdd Delete the line and save the content to the registered t
Marks Link to heading
One cal also mark parts of the text with the following commands:
m a Mark current position with a
a can be any letter, and vim distinguishes uppercases and lowercases. One can move to the marked positions with
'a Move cursor to the line marked with a
`a Move cursor to the character marked with a
`` Return to the position of the previous mark after a move
'' Return to the beginning of the line of the previous mark
The Ex editor Link to heading
The ex editor is behind the curtains of vim, so it might be useful to learn one or two things about it. First, when we use the colons ‘:’, we are using the ex editor. So, it is an line editor. Some important commands are the following:
:n Cursor goes to line n
:nd Delete line n
:n1,n2d Delete lines n1 to n2
:ny Copy line n
:n1,n2y Copy lines n1 to n2
:n1mn2 Move line n1 to the line below n2
:n1,n2mn3 Move lines n1 to n2 the line below n3
The last command is similar to delete and paste
Symbols with special meanings
:. Represents the current line
:% Represents the entire document
:p Print the current line
:# Print the current line with the number
Other useful commands are
:= Print the total number of lines in the document
:.= Print the number of the current line
It is important to notice that we have some special symbols. For example, we already know that $ means the end of the final line, and 0 means the beginning of the current line. But in the ex command, these symbols mean different things. For example
:0 Cursor goes to the beginning of the document.
:$ Cursor goes to the end of the document.
Evidently, these commands are equivalent to, respectively, gg and G.
So, we can combine these symbols with commands. For example, one can delete the current line, through the end of the document with :.,$d
We already know how to make searches with vim, but ex also has a global search pattern. That means that we can search for a pattern and the editor shows all lines that contain the searched pattern.
:g/pattern Shows all the lines that contain the pattern
:g!/pattern Shows all the lines that do not contain the pattern
Working with multiple files Link to heading
We have already seen how to open more than one file, but we have not explored this possibility yet.
vim <file1> <file2> Open file1 and file2
:e <file> Open the file from the vim editor (e means edit)
:bn Move to the next files(buffer next)
:bp Move to the previous files(buffer previous)
:bd Close file (buffer delete)
Global replacement Link to heading
Now, we would like to search and replace patterns.
:s/old/new Search command. It changes the first occurrence.
:s/old/new/g It changes all the occurrences.
:m,ns/old/new/g It changes all the occurrences between lines m to n.
Sometimes we want to search for patterns with special characters. For example, dots, question marks and slashes. We can avoid these symbols with another slash. For example \ means . This is particularly convenient when we are writing LaTeX documents.