I use the shortcut w to move the cursor one word right. Is there a shortcut to move a word left?
Use b to move back one word.
Use w to move forward one word.
And here is a cheat sheet that might be useful for you:
Source: Graphical vi-vim Cheat Sheet and Tutorial
It's b.
You can see other motions here:
Vim documentation: motion, 4. Word motions
Generally a Vim command consists of:
count action motion
Where:
count is number of times you want it to execute. The default is 1.
action is obviously an action: d for delete, c for change, default is empty, and it means simply move.
motion is the direction. You got that already.
In addition to the b movement mentioned in the other answers, another movement which may be interesting is ge.
It brings you to the last letter of the word on the left. When b is considered as the opposite of w, ge can be considered as the opposite of e which brings you to the end of the current word.
Also note that all of those word-wise movement have a WORD-wise equivalent: W, B, E and gE which are "faster". For the difference between words and WORDS see: :h word.
Yes, you can use "b" to backforward a word, and in advance, "2b" to move back two words.
You want to move left (back). b does it.
Related
In a general sense, my question is how do I do something like "dw" or "dd", but instead of deleting characters, I want to over-write with spaces?
E.g. lets say I have text:
first second third
if the cursor is on the "s" in second, I can hit "dw" to get:
first third
but what if I want:
first third
Is there a simple way to do that? An ideal solution would be to use the "d" style syntax (e.g. dw, daw, d$, etc.) but with whitespace replacement instead of deletion.
From the start of the word,
Ctrl-v to enter visual block mode,
e to move to the end of the word (highlighting the word in the process),
r[SPACE] to replace the highlighted characters with spaces.
Because of their very nature (the next character must be consumed), r and R can't work like operators. If you want to replace a motion, visually select it first, and then do r<Space> or r_ or whatever.
In this very specific case:
ver<Space>
or:
viwr<Space>
NOTE: I used ve and viw because the semantics of w are inconsistent so I prefer to avoid it when possible.
Let's suppose I have the cursor located as depicted on next image
Pressing b in normal mode I can go to the start of the word.
Great!
If I move cursor to 1 like
and press b we have
Question:
Is there a motion command to move cursor to start of the word so that if the word is one character long remains at the initial position? In my example, the cursor should stay at 1.
I'm looking this motion command to implement a Macro that in some of the steps move cursor to the start of a word, with words sometimes having just one character.
Simplest solution I have found for this is just wb which works wherever your cursor is on the word, and for single character and multi character words.
Source is reddit user 'happysri' from this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/1xzfjy/go_to_start_of_current_word_if_not_already_there/
I don't believe there is such a motion (please, anyone, correct me if I'm wrong)
But you can achieve that with a search:
:call search('\<', 'bc')
\< matches the beginning of a word
The b stands for backwards
The c is to accept matches under the cursor
I've found this answer Move to end of the current word in Vim that is somehow similar to my problem...
Applying the idea shown there, I should always move one character forward l and then move at the beginning of the word with b. That works and it is consistent for words of different sizes.
Is there a simple way (without too many keystrokes), to substitute the next occurrence of a pattern (in the line or in the whole document, both would be interesting), starting from the cursor position?
So far, I've only come up with selecting onwards, going to normal mode, and doing :s/\%Vpattern/rep. It's too cumbersome. Perhaps there's a nice way to select the next occurrance of a pattern, and then one can "change" the selection?
Thanks
You can use the confirm option with your substitution. Use the command
:%s/pattern/replacement/gc
It will take you through each occurrence of the pattern. Type y to replace, n to move on without replacing, and q to quit the search.
You can use gn
Just search for the pattern, using /
Select using gn
Once selected, you can perform any action on it. Like y to copy, c to change etc
:h gn
Vim noob here. I am trying to select multiple lines of code to copy and paste in other areas. Is there a way to do this without using the mouse?
A few other ways that don't use visual mode at all:
using marks
leave a mark somewhere with ma
move somewhere else
yank from here to there with y'a
using search motions
localize some unique token at the end of the part you want to yank
yank from here to there with y/foo<cr> (forward search) or y?bar<cr> (backward search)
using text-objects
determine what text-object would map to what you want to yank:
inner/outer word, iw/aw
inner/outer pair, i'"([{</a'"([{<
inner/outer html tag, it/at
sentence, s
paragraph, p
"block", ]
…
yank that text-object with, say, yip
using other motions
yank to end of function: y]}
yank to end of file: yG
all of the above solutions with visual mode
V'ay
V/foo<cr>y
V?bar<cr>y
Vipy, etc.
V]}y
VGy
:h motion.txt will hopefully blow your mind, like it did to mine.
You can place your cursor in the first line you want to copy and then type nyy where n is the number of lines you want to copy. For example, type 2yy to copy the two lines under the cursor.
Then, you can paste them using p.
You can also select multiple lines by placing your cursor somewhere and keeping Shift pressed. Move your cursor to the end of the desired selection and stop pressing Shift. Then copy using just y (and not yy) and paste with p.
Yep, in normal mode type V[direction] and you will highlight multiple lines. If you don't want whole lines, use v instead of V. To copy it, hit y and move to the area which you want to paste in and hit p. To delete it, instead of y use x.
Alternatively, you can simply use [number of lines]yy to yank some number of lines or [number of lines]dd to cut some number of lines. In this case pasting is the same.
When you're using vim, you can move forward word by word with w. How do I go backwards?
Use b to go back a word.
You may also want to check out W and B to advance/go back a WORD (which
consists of a sequence of non-blank characters separated with white space, according to :h WORD).
It helps for me to think of it as:
b to go to beginning of current or previous word
w to go the beginning of next word
e to go to the end of current or next word
ge to go the end of the previous word
Try :h word-motions for more details and how to combine them with operations.
use "b" to move back - just tested in vi - works fine.
Alternatively, if you use w, b, W, and B to navigate lines by hopping over words, consider the following alternatives which can be faster if used correctly.
f<char> # jump to next occurrence of <char> to right (inclusive)
or
F<char> # jump back to next occurrence of <char> to left (inclusive)
If your words are separated by spaces
If your words are separated by <space> you can hop over words by spaces:
f<space>;;;; where ; repeats the previous command, so you hop forward by spaces
F<space>;; to hop backwards by space
If your words are separated by punctuation and not spaces
just replace <char> with punctuation, for example .
The punctuation method is not efficient for scrolling through, but if you know where you want to jump, it can usually get there in a jump or two.