Townsville Linux Users Group

At the last meeting we covered a few vim commands so people can expand their vim repertoire. Here are some quick notes from that presentation.

Simple Commands

• J - join lines
• o/O - insert line (before/After current line) and go into insert mode
• w/b - for next word/prev word
• dw - delete word
• d25w - delete 25 words
• :syntax on - turns on syntax highlighting (on some distros this is on by default)

Advanced: Recording

1. qa - start recording to register 'a' (you can use any of a-z, must be a single letter)
2. <type a bunch of commands>
3. q - stop recording to register
4. @a - repeat commands in register 'a' one time
5. 10@a - repeat commands in register 'a' 10 times

Advanced: Find and Replace
:%s/badwrod/goodword/g

where:

• % is the range (% means entire file)
• / is the delimiter
• s is the replace command
• badwrod is a regular expression to match
• goodword is the replacement expression
• g is a modifier, telling vim to apply the replacement to all occurrences, not just one per line

More basic commands: Vim Cheat Sheet

More on macros: in vim type :help recording

More on find and replace: in vim type :help substitute

Cheers!

Darren