Essential Vim Motions & Tricks

Master these lesser-known, yet powerful, Vim commands to dramatically speed up your text editing workflow.

1. Quick Exits

Save precious seconds when closing files.

Save and Quit: Type ZZ (Two capital Zs). This is a quick way to write changes and exit.
Quit without saving: Type ZQ (Capital Z, then Q). Quits without saving, similar to using :q!.

Use the “inner block” motion (i) combined with the block type to quickly target content within delimiters.

Select inside parentheses (): Use vib (visual inner block or ‘b’ for balanced symbols).
Select inside curly braces {}: Use viB (visual inner BRACE, capital B).
Change inside quotes "": Use ci" (change inner quote). This works with '' and \` too.
Change inside parentheses (): Use cib. This quickly deletes the content and puts you in insert mode.

Perform operations on blocks of text across multiple lines.

Enter Block Mode: Press Ctrl+v before selecting lines.
Insert at Start of Block: While in Visual Block mode, press capital I (I). Type your text, then press Esc; the text will appear on every selected line.
Append at End of Block: After selecting the block and moving to the end of the line ($), press capital A (A). Type your text, then press Esc; the text will appear appended to every selected line.
Re-select Last Block: Use gv to jump back into Visual Block mode with the last block selected.

Fluidly move around and clean up your code.

Re-indent the whole file: Use gg=G. This combines go to top (gg), apply auto-indent (=), and go to bottom (G).
Jump between matching pairs: Use %. Place the cursor on a (, {, [, or similar symbol and jump directly to its match.
Jump to specific line number: Type the line number, then capital G (e.g., 42G goes to line 42).
Join lines with a space: Use capital J (J). This joins the current line and the next with one space between them.
Join lines without a space: Use gJ. This joins the lines without inserting a space.

Quickly switch the case of text.

Toggle character case: Use ~ (Tilde) in Normal mode to toggle the case of the character under the cursor.
Toggle word case: Use g~w to toggle the case for the current word.
Toggle case in a tag: Use g~it to toggle the case for text inner tag (useful for HTML/XML).

Quickly interact with your environment.

Suspend Vim to terminal: Press Ctrl+z to temporarily pause Vim and return to the shell.
Return Vim to foreground: Type fg in your terminal to resume your Vim session.
Open URL under cursor: Use gx. This opens the web link under the cursor in your default browser.
Open file path under cursor: Use gf. This opens the file path under the cursor (if it exists in the Vim path).

Marks allow you to quickly jump between locations within and across files.

Set Mark (Current File): Use m followed by a lowercase letter (e.g., ma). This mark is only valid within the current file.
Jump to Mark (Current File): Use ' (single quote) followed by the lowercase letter (e.g., 'a). Jumps to the marked line and column.
Set Mark (Across Files): Use m followed by an uppercase letter (e.g., mA). This mark is valid across files and persists until Vim closes.
Jump to Mark (Across Files): Use ' (single quote) followed by the uppercase letter (e.g., 'A). Jumps to the correct file and line.

Tags: Vim, Cli, Learning