VIM beginners guide and cheat sheet

The command line text editor vim is popular in the world of programming, and for good reason. It can be found on nearly any Unix (and often Windows) system, making it ideal for loading into remote machines and making quick edits to files. It is also very powerful in the right hands. If you watch an expert vim user code with vim, the cursor is bouncing all over as they quickly write or edit their files, all without ever touching a mouse…

I am not one of those people. I picked up vim out of necessity while working on remote hosts without access to a GUI text editor (I’m partial to VS Code). But since I needed to use vim, I wanted to get better at it, so I took a vim Udemy course, and I’ve been using what I’ve learned to get a little more efficient in vim. If you’re a vim beginner, this post will teach you the commands I found most useful while learning vim. And if you’re a casual vim user like me, this post can serve as a cheat sheet reminder for all the vim commands you and I will continue to forget.

The essentials

These are the set of commands that you need to enter a file, make changes, and get out (with or without saving).

1. Enter into a file for editing: Type: vim some_file.txt or vi some_file.txt to enter a file with vim.

2. Exit a file without saving: First press ESC to enter Normal Mode. Then type :q! + ENTER. q here means “quit” while ! means “force”, and vim won’t exit without it if you’ve made any changes.

3. Save a file and exit: First press ESC to enter Normal Mode. Then type :wq + ENTER. w means “write” here so you can also just use :w + ENTER without q to save the file without exiting.

4. Enter Insert Mode: This is the mode where you can add text to the file. While in Normal Mode, press i (for “insert”). Recall that you can press ESC whenever you want to exit Insert Mode to go back to Normal Mode.

Navigation

These commands will get you around the file with ease. Notice where I use capital vs lowercase letters, as I might not always point it out. Case matters in vim. For all of the following commands in this section, unless otherwise specified, I’ll assume you are in Normal Mode (recall you can get there by hitting ESC).

1. Move up, down, left, and right: There are two main ways to move in these directions. You can use the up, down, left, and right arrow keys in any mode. If you are in Insert Mode, these are the only keys for navigating. However, from Normal Mode, you can navigate in these directions without leaving typing position: h is left, j is up, k is down, and l is right. Notice the left-most key of these 4 keys (h) is left, the right-most key (l) is right, and the middle two are (j) up followed by (k) down.

2. Go to the start of the file: Press g + g to go to the start of the file.

3. Go to the end of the file: Press capital G (ie SHIFT-G) to go to the end of the file.

4. Go to a specific line in the file: Type :LIN_NUM + ENTER to go to that line number. Eg. :25 + ENTER to go to line 25.

5. Go to the start of the current line: Type 0 (zero) to go to the start of the current line. You can also press ^ (carrot)(ie SHIFT-6) to go to the first non-blank character of the line. You might recall that ^ is the start character for regex expressions.

6. Go to the end of the current line: Type $ (dollar sign)(ieSHIFT-4) to go to the end of the current line. You might recall $ is the end character for regex expressions.

7. Move forward one word: Type w to move your cursor to the next word. I find this to be a quick way of moving through a line.

8. Search for a word: type / + SEARCH + ENTER to search for a word. E.g. /foo + ENTER will search for all instances of “foo” in the text. Note if the hlsearch setting is set, found searches will start highlighting as you type. To go to the next found search item, press n, or to go to the previous search item, press capital N. You can remove the previous search’s highlight by typing :noh (for no highlight), or if you can’t remember this (and I just looked :noh up so obviously I can’t), just search for something new that doesn’t exist. Eg. /asdfasdfas + ENTER.

Entering Insert Mode with style

There are a host of ways to enter Insert Mode to start writing new text. Here are the most useful ones. For all these commands, I will assume you are already in Normal mode (ESC).

1. Enter Insert Mode in place: Press i to enter Insert Mode one character before the character your cursor is on. I already mentioned this one in section one.

2. Enter Insert Mode at line beginning: Press capital I to enter Insert Mode at the beginning of the line containing your cursor.

3. Enter Insert Mode with append: Press a to enter Insert Mode one character after the character your cursor is on.

4. Enter Insert Mode at line end: Press capital A to enter Insert Mode at the end of the line containing your cursor.

5. Enter Insert Mode below your current line: Press o to create a new line below the line containing your cursor and enter Insert Mode there. Note this will not break the line in half if your cursor is mid-line.

6. Enter Insert Mode above your current line: Press capital O to create a new line above the line containing your cursor and enter Insert Mode there.

Undo, Redo

Sometimes you make a mistake and need to un-make that mistake. You could :q! to exit without saving, but let’s see if we can find a less drastic solution. These commands should be performed from Normal Mode (ESC).

1. Undo: Press u to undo. Uppercase U undoes all the latest changes on one line (which I don’t ever use).

2. Redo: Press Ctrl-r to redo.

Deleting things (and cut)

There are multiple ways to delete different-sized chunks of code in vim. Let’s take a look at some of the more common ones. d stands for delete in vim so commands focus around this key. Note that vim always saves the last deleted thing to the default register (more on registers later). So in a sense, there is no delete, just cut with short-term memory. All these commands should be performed from Normal Mode (ESC).

1. Delete/cut a letter: Press d + l to delete a letter and save it to the default register.

2. Delete/cut a word: Press d + w to delete a word and save it to the default register.

3. Delete/cut a line: Press d + d to delete a line and save it to the default register.

Also, note that while in Insert Mode you can use BACKSPACE and DEL, as usual, to delete characters before or after your cursor respectively. This form of deletion does not save to the default register.

Copy/paste

We’ve already seen how to cut (the same as deleting). Here we see how to copy items to the register and also to paste items from the register. Copying in vim is called yanking, so those commands use y. All these commands should be performed from Normal Mode (ESC).

1. Copy/yank a letter: Press y + l to copy a letter to the default register.

2. Copy/yank a word: Press y + w to copy a word to the default register.

3. Copy/yank a line: Press y + y to copy a line to the default register.

4. Paste after the cursor: Press p to paste whatever is in the default register immediately after the character the cursor is hovering over.

5. Paste before the cursor: Press capital P to paste whatever is in the default register immediately before the character the cursor is hovering over.

What is this register I keep mentioning? Briefly, a register can store copied/cut text. A register can be “named”. For example, to copy to the b named register you could type "b followed by your yank. And then to use that yanked text, type "b + p. The default register is where text is stored and pasted from if you don’t use a named register. Only the latest copy/cut text is stored in a register. Subsequent stores override the previous store. If registers interests you, give them a quick google search for more details.

Also, note these commands are only for copy/paste from within vim. Copying and pasting from the system clipboard is trickier. While it is possible with key commands, usually I’ve had success just using a good old fashion mouse right-click + click dropdown item for this purpose, so just do that.

Replace Mode

Replace Mode is like Insert Mode, except all typed characters overwrite whatever the cursor is hovering. These commands should begin in Normal Mode (ESC).

1. Replace a single character: Place cursor over the character to be replaced and press r + NEW CHARACTER (ie r + f) to replace the hovered character with “f”. Vim will immediately re-enter Normal Mode after replacing this character.

2. Replace multiple characters: Place cursor over the character you want to start replacing at and press capital R. Vim will enter Replace Mode at that character and all subsequent characters typed will replace the following characters on that line. For instance with the cursor over the “d” from “dog”, I could type Rcat to replace “dog” with “cat”. To exit replace mode you can hit ESC.

Doing things in multiples

Vim has a cool sentence structure like syntax that you can use to perform actions. We saw this earlier with commands like d + w for “delete a word”. Adding a number at the start of these sentence-like commands will perform that command that number of times. For instance to “delete 3 words” I could type 3 + d + w and the hovered word plus the next two will be deleted. To copy (yank) 2 lines, I can type 2 + y + y. And to undo the last 4 actions I could type 4 + u. Neat, eh?

Bonus: Vim settings

I think vim is much nicer when it is configured the way you like it. Here’s a list of settings I like to use when running vim. Put these settings (plus or minus the ones you like) into a file at ~/.vimrc. In the file, " at the start of a line means it is a comment.

" use syntax highlighting
syntax on
" Show line number
set number
" Show the cursor position
set ruler
" Show incomplete commands
set showcmd
" Highlight searched words
set hlsearch
" Incremental search
set incsearch
" Search ignore case unless capitalized letters used in search
set ignorecase
set smartcase
" Don't line-break mid-word
set lbr
" Set auto-indent (auto indent when the previous line was indented for coding)
set autoindent
" Set smart indent (smartly indent when code indicates indent should occur)
set smartindent
" Replace tab with spaces
set expandtab
" Set tab spacing to 4
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set softtabstop=4

Conclusions

These were the vim commands (and settings) I found most useful in breaking past the bare minimum of what it takes to code in vim. As I said earlier, I am by no means a vim expert. I’ve only recently been using vim commands more complicated than the ones I listed in “vim essentials”. But now that I’ve learned some of these neat commands, I have to say, vim is not so scary anymore and is even pretty pleasant to code in.

Vim is very powerful and there is a lot you can do with it. I’m sure vim experts would disagree with some of my choices for a curated list of commands. A couple of other vim topics I left out that you should look into if you want to get “good” with vim are:

• Using the vim manual to look all these commands and ideas up yourself
• Macros (save a series of vim commands to 1 or 2 keystrokes)
• vim replace (replace words/phrases found with vim search)
• Visual Mode (make more complex edits in grid-like patterns)
• Many others I can’t think of right now

If you are interested in a vim deep dive, I highly recommend the Vim masterclass Udemy course where you can learn these commands and many others and how to “think like a vim user” to really speed up your vim coding.