A minimal cheat-sheet to get by in vim (vi /gvim)

There’s no doubt that vim/vi or gvim is an incredibly powerful editor. it’s also very lightweight and fast, making it an ideal editor on the Raspberry Pi. It does however have a learning curve. This in a minimal cheat-sheet of commands. The ones in bold are I think the ones you need to learn to be able to use it at a basic level. Also try running vimtutor from the command line for a tutorial.

Esc key – Normal mode

Inserting text

a -append

i – insert

o – open (inserts line below current line, O open above current line)

r – replace (replaces the character under the cursor with the next one entered,

R – replace mode (overwrite text until Esc pressed)

ce – change (deletes to end of word and then switches to insert mode) c$ deletes the rest of the line

Deleting text

x -delete character

dw – delete word      (d2w delete two words)

de – delete from cursor to end of word

d$ – delete from cursor to end of line

dd – delete the line  (2dd delete two lines)

Undo

u – undo

U – undo all changes on a line

Put, Past and Cut

p – put the contents of the buffer (paste) (this is the last thing deleted or yanked)

v – visual selections mode (highlights text for eg deletions or write to file with :w FILENAME)

y – yank (copies highlighted text), yw – yanks word

Moving about

gg – go to start of the file

GG – go to end of the file

504G – goto line 504

/  – search, n find next, N find previous

% – find matching bracket (,[,{

0 – move to start of the line, ^ move to first non space character.

$ – move to end of the line

Status

^G – file and position status

! – execute external command e.g. !ls

Writing and Reading

:w – save the file

:w FILENAME – save as FILENAME

:r FILENAME – inserts content of file here, you can also insert output of commands eg :r !ls

:q! -quit discarding changes

: x – quit saving changes (if there are any as opposed to :wq which always saves)