ViM Cheat Sheet

Creating and Using Marks

The command ma marks the place under the cursor as mark a.You can place 26 marks (a through z) in your text. (You can use a number of other marks as well.) To go to a mark, use the command `mark, where mark is the mark letter (and ` is the backtick or open single-quote character). The command ‘mark (single quotation mark, or apostrophe) moves you to the beginning of the line containing the mark.This differs from the `mark command, which moves you to the marked line and column.

The ‘mark command can be very useful when deleting a long series of lines.To delete a long series of lines, follow these steps:

Move the cursor to the beginning of the text you want to delete.
Mark it using the command ma. (This marks it with mark a.)
Go to the end of the text to be removed. Delete to mark a using the command d’a.

Listing Marks

To list all the marks, use the following command:
:marks

Yanking Stuff

Using marks, first go to the top of the text to be copied and mark it with ma.Then go to the bottom and do a y’a (yank to mark a). Now go to where the copied text is to be inserted and put it there using the p command.
The Y command yanks a single line. If preceded by a count, it yanks that number of lines into the register.

Filtering

You want to sort lines 1 through 10 of a file.You start by putting the cursor on line 1. Next you execute the following command:
!10G
The ! tells Vim that you are performing a filter operation.The Vim editor expects a motion command to follow indicating which part of the file to filter.The 10G command tells Vim to go to line 10, so it now knows that it is to filter lines 1 (the current line) through 10 (10G). In anticipation of the filtering, the cursor drops to the bottom of the screen and a ! prompt displays.You can now type in the name of the filter program, in this case sort. Therefore, your full command is as follows:
!10Gsort
The !! command runs the current line through a filter. Examples:
!!ls
!!date

Editing Two Files

By pressing CTRL-^, you can switch editing from the current file to the alternate file.

Buffers

:buffers - lists the buffers
:bnext
:buffer #number - moves to that buffer

Visual Mode

v character mode
V line mode
ctrl-V rectangle mode
d deletes the highlighted chars
D deletes the highlighted lines even partially
y/Y Yank and linewise yank
c/C Deletes the selected text and starts in insert mode
J Joins all the lines
>< Indent/outdent

Programming Stuff

Ctrl-D while in insert mode, moves back one tabstop.
% matches brackets
>i{ shifts all text between brackets one tabstop.
set list/nolist

Searching - Highlighting

The following command causes Vim to highlight any strings found matching the search pattern:
:set hlsearch
To turn off search highlighting, use this command:
:set nohlsearch
To clear the current highlighting, use the following command:
:nohlsearch