visual block

<C-v> enters Visual Block (not visual line) mode

Once you’ve selected text you can I/A to insert and the beginning/end, or c (change) to delete the selected text, and change to insert mode. Once you’re done typing, hit Esc to affect each line from the visual block selection.

o swaps the corner that your modifying, so if you’re currently moving down and right, and the cursor is in the bottom right, this switches it to the top left. See :help 04.4 /going to the other side

autobuf commands

Examples from my vim config:

" run set spell when editing markdown
autocmd VimEnter * if expand('%:e') == 'md' | set spell
" or when writing a git commit
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile * if expand('%:t') == 'COMMIT_EDITMSG' | set spell

See here for more autocmd events.

VimLeavePre is another useful one, to run a linter/command against a file after saving

scrolling

Ctrl+U/Ctrl+D scrolls up down

Scrolling relative to cursor:

• zz move current line to middle of screen
• zt move current line to top of screen
• zb move current line to bottom of the screen

Integer increment/decrement

Ctrl+A and Ctrl+X increment/decrement integers, very useful for automating things with macros.

Jumping

Other than the typical Ctrl+O, Ctrl+I to jump forward/back in your tag stack, can also use * and # to jump forward/backward against the word currently under the cursor, which is useful for variable names/constants

Commands

nmap, vmap, options, command lists key -> value pairs for each of these items. :options includes an editor, as well!

| can be used to chain commands

Files/Buffers

You can use :next, :wnext (write + next), :first, :last, to cycle through the files that vim was started with. If you want to change those after vim has started, you can use :args to change the CLI args. You can even do something like :args *.py. However, if you just want to cycle through all files, the [f and ]f mappings from vim-unimpaired pretty nice for that.

this can be used along with recursive mappings to do automation pretty nicely. see :help 40.1 /recursive. I tend to use nnoremap to avoid expanding the substitution again, but if you include something like this:

:map ,, :s/5.1/5.2/<CR>:wnext<CR>,,

… the ,, at the end triggers the mapping again.

so, this replaces 5.1 with 5.2, writes the file, and then goes to the next item in :args, and starts the mapping again. It ends when there’s an error, either when there are no more files, or it can’t find a match.

If you want to continue even when there are no matches, you can add e after the substitution: s/5.1/5.2/e.

cmdline-ranges

:help cmdline-ranges. This video goes over a lot of useful :Ex commands that are still pretty good to know, even in nvim.

Some instructive commands:

%g!/error/d - Search the whole file %, run :g! (:global) on any lines that dont match a pattern /error/ and d (delete) those lines

The '<,'> that appears when running commands on visual selection is a command line range, describing two marks '< and '>. These are set when you start selecting text. See :help '<

You could similarly do something like :'<,$ to select from the beginning of your selection to the end of the file. Or like :.,.+10 to select the next 10 lines.

Writing/Reading from commands

See :help 10.9 for more information

!! sends the current line through a filter.

You can also run commands without replacing the current line, by entering the cmd on the cmdline

:read !ls reads the output and enters it in the textfile.

You can also just :write to the STDIN of a command, like :write !wc. This prints the output of the command using the pager, and it does not write the current file.

:!{program}		execute {program}
:r !{program}		execute {program} and read its output
:w !{program}		execute {program} and send text to its input
:[range]!{program}	filter text through {program}

Cmdline editing

while entering a command you can use different keybinds to move back and forth in the command:

<Left>			one character left
<Right>			one character right
<S-Left> or <C-Left>	one word left
<S-Right> or <C-Right>	one word right
CTRL-B or <Home>	to begin of command line
CTRL-E or <End>		to end of command line

Editing Tables

If you have a table that is separates by some white space, you can do set virtualedit=all. vim infers where empty slots for the table would be, word movements move you across the empty fields.