Unearthing the Treasure Trove of Vim: A Guide to the Most Obscure and Useless Commands in the Land of the Text Editor

December 5, 2022

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I saw some Vim commands that would really help me out to remember.

Scope with ({["

Chain these commands with a symbol to change within a scope.

i - inside scope - exclusive inner match

Match all text inside brackets / symbols.

• ci{ - delete all text inside {} scope and enter insert mode
• di( - delete all text inside () scope
• yi[ - yank all text inside [] scope
• vi" - select all text inside "" scope

a - scope to matching symbol - inclusive inner match

Similar to i, but also selects the matching brackets / symbols.

• ca{ - delete all text inside {} scope and enter insert mode
• da( - delete all text inside () scope
• ya[ - yank all text inside [] scope
• va" - select all text inside "" scope
• ap matches “around paragraph”
• ip matches “in paragraph”

In the above examples, p can be replaced with any vim object. A word, ”, ’, (, {, [, etc. And a command can be chained at the beginning:

• vap select a whole paragraph and surrounding lines
• vip select all text in a paragraph
• va" select all text and surrounding quotes
• vi" select all text inside quotes
• di( delete all text inside ()
• ci{ change all text inside {}
• ya[ yank all text and surrounding []

g - jump to

• gi - jump to last insert
• gv - jump to last selection

Misc

• gq - add line breaks to selected text that exceeds the delimiter
• ~ - capitalize
• guaw - lowercase the word under the cursor
• gUaw - uppercase the word under the cursor
• guu - lowercase line
• gUU - uppercase line

I use ciw for replacing words all the time already, but I didn’t know I could select stuff from within a bigger scope. That will be really useful.

• ZQ force quit
• ZZ save quit
• zz shift current line to middle of screen
• zt shift current line to top of screen
• zb shift current line to bottom of screen
• { move up a paragraph
• } move down a paragraph

I think none of these are particularly useful for me except maybe ZZ. I still have a habit of :wq

• ctrl+g show information about the file
• gj move down visual line on a wrapped line
• gk move up visual line on a wrapped line
• g0 move to beginning of visual line on a wrapped line
• g$ move to beginning of visual line on a wrapped line
• ~ change capitalization of a letter
• g~ same as ~ but runs on a text object
• gf jump to filename under cursor
• gj Join lines without adding spaces between
• g& repeat substitution across file
• g* or * jumps to the next instance of the word under the cursor.
• g# jumps to the previous instance of the word under the cursor.

While in insert mode enter C-k to insert a special character.

Use :digraph to see a chart of special characters and their key combinations.

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