In vim, I really love f & t in Normal mode. Are there vertical versions of these? If not, what's the best way to jump so many lines downward to a word that I see? Do I just have to count the lines and do 12j or something?
Can you use /foo (or ?foo for backwards)? I tend to use that more than t or f anyway.
I think you'll love the EasyMotion plugin.
You'll type <leader>fb to go to a b, horizontally and vertically.
(you can also find the vim.org mirror git here)
Try vim-sneak, a plugin I wrote for this very reason. It enables you to jump to any location in three keystrokes by specifying the first two characters of the target:
s{char}{char}
For example, sab moves the cursor to the next instance of the string "ab". And Sab moves backwards to the previous instance of "ab".
It also supports:
visual mode
operations (like dzab, czab, and yzab)
operation-repeat with .
motion-repeat with ; and ,
vim-sneak is similar to vim-seek, with many improvements.
Related
Imagine you need to change a few last letters in a word.
From
.. visualizing a graph?_
(_ denotes where the cursor is, mode:normal)
you need to arrive at
.. visualize| a graph?
(| denotes the cursor, mode:insert)
How would you do this?
(please suggest how would you really do this, not the "super-doper" way nobody uses)
I am asking, because I do this insanely inefficiently:
type b until reach _visualizing a graph?,
followed by e (visualizinG a graph?),
followed by x to remove g under cursor,
followed by few Shift+x to remove what is before the cursor,
and, finally, i switch into the insert mode and type e.
With given example, I would do:
Tzcwe
If there are just a few words between the cursor and where I want to go, I will use CTRL+left as many times as needed plus CTRL+right once and <bs> 3 times. I may also use the mouse. It's not that different from what you use, except I don't leave the insert mode for simple moves. Note this is exactly what I use when I type messages in my browser (I've never been conquered by vimperator & co).
I'm aware of <esc>gegege...3<left>cwe<esc>. But that's definitively not my first choice.
I may use T and F on symbols with few occurrences, but I seldom use them on letters as I'll spend more time detecting the best character to use than using CTRL+cursor as many times as needed. Beside, when I'm correcting what I've typed, it's likely that my mind is in "reread+correct/refactor sentences" mode, speed typing is not my priority.
Is there a shortcut in vim to delete from the current cursor to the end of the sentence?
cursor
v
This is half a sentence. My cursor is here, but I would
like to delete to this period. I do not want to delete this part.
^
delete from cursor to here
Imagine my cursor is somewhere on the text that says My cursor is here,. How can I delete from this line all the way (and including) that next .?
Though there's no exact motion for that, there are several possibilities:
The ) motion deletes the remainder of the sentence, but that also includes the whitespace after the period.
If there were no hard line break, you could use the useful f motion (which only works in the current line, unless you install a plugin): f. This is also useful if you want to keep the period: t.
The most general motion is search via /. You need to search for a literal period (\.), and to include it, move to the end (/e) of it: /\./e<Enter>.
All of these have to be appended to the d "delete" command, which takes a {motion}.
Learn how to look up commands and navigate the built-in :help (here, :help motion.txt in particular); it is comprehensive and offers many tips. You won't learn Vim as fast as other editors, but if you commit to continuous learning, it'll prove a very powerful and efficient editor.
you should combine d with motion command. for your example, this will be d/\.<Ret>
This visual-mode editing may help you understand what actually happen:
v/\.<Ret>ld
Let's say we're currently in this line of code:
readonly L|a|zy<ICountryRepository> countryRepo;
and the cursor is in the position of letter "a", as shown in the code between two "|" symbols.
Now I want to move my cursor to the letter y of the word countryRepo, how can I do that using the minimum key strokes?
(Currently I'm using the key sequence of fyfyfyfy in normal mode ... Kind of stupid)
If you know that it's the 4th y, you can do
4fy
If you know it's the last y in the line, you can do
$Fy
If you don't know at which position it is, you can still do
fy;;;
In this case, I would use
W
to move to countryRepo, followed by
fy
I can think of:
4fy
But you should only do this if you are some strange robot.
/co<cr>fy
Which is one character shorter than your solution, but more easy..
Wfy
Go one WORD forward and then find y.
f>fy
Something like this I would do. Depends on what popups in my mind.
You should look into the easymotion plugin, which helps with arbitrary movements.
EDIT:
easymotion is rather worthless here, it is more useful for jumping to targets further away.
If you have vim-easymotion, https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion
You can do <leader><leader>t and then search for letter y. It's not that fast for the letters on the same line though. The real advantage is when you jump in the entire file.
I would do
tR;
or
WtR
or maybe
Wfy
Use EasyMotion.
In your case, <Leader><Leader>e then a corresponding keypress (in this case b) will bring your cursor onto the second y. Personally I use <Leader> as the easymotion trigger so it is only 3 keystrokes for me. The main advantage is you do not need to guess or calculate.
use / for search, then type your word and press Enter
however, if you want to jump to next word, just press n
I haven't seen this asked on stackoverflow, and this is my biggest pain point in vim:
How do you all navigate within a file? I found myself using the hjkl too much, or too repetitively, and I want to get better at this. This is frustrating when you're on a large monitor.
I installed EasyMotion - and so far it's been good for me - I just want to know if there's something better...
Thanks!
I like the cheatsheet of Ted Naleid. It's like a reticle so you can easily find the horizontal and vertical movements. Put it on a wall next to your monitor and you will soon pick up new movements on the fly.
The movements that I liked recently are:
() and {} which let you hop function wise in source code
/ and ? + n/N just search, you normally know where you want to go
fx and tx - to jump to or before the next character x
of course you can do a 2fx to jump to the second occurrence of x, like you can do with all movements
% to move between starting and ending parenthesis
I use b and w to move left and right respectively on a single line. For up and down, I use Ctrl+u and Ctrl+d respectively. IMO Ctrl+u and Ctrl+d are better than Ctrl+b and Ctrl+f because they scroll half window at a time so that you don't loose context.
I haven't really used any plugin for moving around in vim so far.
Forgot to mention two other important keystrokes, $ and ^ to move to end of line and start of line respectively.
Several move commands:
b B e E f F ge gE gj gk go G h H j k l L M n N t T w W { } / ? ^ $ # * ` ' | %
Learn them, plus all commands starting with [ like [{ which is very useful when editing C-style code…
See :help index.txt for reference.
Mostly I use the following (in order of frequency):
'R go to marked position (the ` is too off the baseline keyboard to use much)
/search|?search forward|backward search
n|N next|previous in search
H|L|M top|bottom|middle of display
G go to end of file
1G go to line 1
{ go backward a 'paragraph' (often a code block)
} go forward one 'paragraph'
Most all of these can be augmented with a count before the command.
It depends on how you want to move around, but generally,
A puts you in insert mode at the end of a line
I at the beginning
o inserts a line below
O above
and more powerfully, searching with /<thing you want to jump to> is very handy. In a c file where the functions are formatted
int
funcname()
/^funcname will jump you to the start of the function. There's a bunch more, but this shold be a good start for someone new to vim.
Simple documentation:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Moving_around
Regular movement:
hjkl/arrow keys/page up/page down
% will switch between open/ending braces
gg/G move to top/bottom
Folding:
For collapsing large blocks of code, you can use folding.
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/fold.html
Search:
To jump to something in particular type /searchstring (use with set inc for jumping to matches while typing)
* to search forward for the same word the cursor is on
# same but search backward
You can also use marks.
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_marks
I also use ctags and jumping to find stuff across multiple files.
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tagsrch.html
I've never needed anything else.
I don't really see much to add in terms of general enlightenment but I use (ranked by how often I use them):
w and b
to move by one word to the right and to the left.
/ and ?
to search for a word or pattern to the bottom or to the top.
G and gg
to jump to the bottom and the top of the buffer.
<C-f> and <C-b>
to jump to the next and previous screen.
* and #
to jump to next and previous occurence of the word under the cursor.
f and F
to jump before a character to the right or to the left.
t and T
to jump on a character to the right or to the left.
Ho! and
$ and ^
a lot, too, to jump to the end and the beginning of a line.
Read http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html and run vimtutor, also :help motion.txt will be usefull. I recommend also staying in normal mode all the time - as described in article above. Generally, learning vim is learning piano - you have to practice much.
For example if I have some code like:
foo = bar("abc", "def", true, callback);
Is there a nice command to move true to the 1st or 2nd position leaving the commas intact?
P.S as a bonus my friend want to know if this works in Emacs too.
In Vim if you place the cursor at the start of the first word and do dWWP then it will have the desired effect. Here is a breakdown:
dW delete the current word, including the comma and the following whitespace
W move to the start of the next word
P insert the deleted text before the cursor
This will work if there are further parameters after the pair to be swapped - it will need to be modified if there are only two parameters or you want to swap the last two parameters, since it will paste the text after the closing bracket.
Alternatively you could use a regex substitution:
:%s/(\([^,]\+\),\s*\([^,)]\+\)/(\2, \1/
This will find the first two arguments after the open bracket and swap them.
update:
A search of vim.org found the swap parameters plugin, which should do exactly what you want and can handle situations that either of the above methods cannot.
I don't know the answer for vi, but in Emacs, transpose-sexps (C-M-t) will swap two arguments either side of the cursor. Actually transpose-words (M-t) was my first guess, but that leaves the quotes behind.
You need a transpose emacs command. But its limited to not guessing that its transposing in lists, it only considers text (it can't guess the 1st, 2nd word of list). Try this.
Keep your cursor at after comma of true. Use M-x transpose-words. By default it will transpose with next word from the point. Shortcut is M-t.
You can use C-u 2 M-t for transpose with next second word.
Now coming to your question. If you want to move true, to backward 1 word, use C-u -1 M-t, and for backward 2 words C-u -2 M-t.
Am not a VIM guy. So sorry bout that.
If you want to do this as a refactoring, not just as text manipulation, I'd suggest looking into Xrefactory, a refactoring tool for Emacsen (free for C/Java, commercial for C++).
Transposing previous (Ctrl-t p) and next (Ctrl-t n) argument ... add the
following into your .vimrc file:
map <C-t>p ?,\\|(<CR>wd/,\\|)<CR>?,\\|(<CR>"_dw?,\\|(<CR>a, <C-c>?,<CR>P/,<CR>w
map <C-t>n ?,\\|(<CR>wv/,<CR>d"_dw/\\,\\|)<CR>i, <C-r>"<C-c>?,<CR>?,\\|(<CR>w