Vim is an extraordinarily powerful text editor despite its famously difficult learning curve. Once you have an understanding of navigation, editing, and basic regular expressions however, the editor begins to feel more natural and you can perform many tasks with ease. To get the most out of Vim however, one must master the concept of command composition. Once a user has mastered these features they become capable of performing almost any task with the minimal amount of motion necessary.
Before beginning, the examples in this tutorial will use the plugins and options below. These features are extraordinarily useful and are enabled in many proficient Vim users .vimrc files in one variation or another. To install these plugins, use a plugin manager such as Plug, Pathogen, or Vundle.
" Show Line Numbers on the side
set number
" Show last command keystroke in the bottom right of the statusline.
set showcmd
" Highlight successful search matches
set hlsearch
" Update search matches as you type
set incsearch
" Bind a single spacebar keystroke to clear search highlighting in normal mode
nnoremap <silent> <Space> :nohlsearch<Bar>:echo<CR>
- christoomey/vim-sort-motion
- christoomey/vim-titlecase
- tpope/vim-commentary
- tpope/vim-repeat
- tpope/vim-surround
In many text editors and IDEs, actions are discrete steps that are performed as necessary by the user. Each action is well-defined and performs exactly one task on the selected text. As a holdover from their experience with other editors, many Vim users will attempt to manipulate text in this series of well-defined steps (Select the text with visual mode and perform one action). This works well for basic tasks however it becomes tedious for many complex ones. For these tasks users will often either spend the time performing this tedious process or they will abandon the text editor all together and spend time building scripts to perform these specific tasks instead.
Much like how Vim uses the modal style instead of the traditional emacs style, actions in Vim break away from traditional editing paradigms. In Vim, actions are closer to sentences than discrete commands. This style takes a while to get used to however it changes the way you think about manipulating text and greatly reduces the amount of effort required to make substantial changes.
Actions in Vim can be divided like a sentence into pieces akin to verbs, nouns,
adjectives, and adverbs. The verb element of an action is just called a verb.
The equivalent to the adverb in Vim is often just referred to as a modifier and
changes the type or number of repetitions of the verb. Nouns and adjectives
together make what are referred to in Vim as a text object. A noun by itself is
instead referred to as a motion. Where text objects define a block the cursor
is within, motions select everything between the cursor and the next object
defined by the specified "noun". For more information on the specific details,
refer to the Vim documentation on motions and text objects with
:help cursor-motions or in the
online documentation.
Similarly to how sentences can be composed into paragraphs, actions in vim can be composed together to form more complex actions. These complex actions can then be recorded to a register and replayed over a large set of text with little to no effort.
Reflowing a text block to the set column width can be done with gqip. gq is
the verb and ip is the text object.
[gq] Reflow
[i] Inner (not effecting surrounding whitespace)
[p] Paragraph
Reflowing the following 3 paragraphs can be done with a motion like 3gq} where
3 is the adverb, gq is the verb, and } is the motion.
[3] For 3 Times
[gq] Reflow
[}] until next paragraph
This deletes the current word without affecting whitespace and enters insert mode to provide replacement text.
[c] Change
[i] Inner
[w] Word
This swaps the case of the entire sentence to title case.
[gt] Swap to title case for
[a] an entire (including whitespace)
[s] Sentence
This creates a comment block around a bracketed block using the comment style of the current file's language. This is a very useful when quickly enabling and disabling debugging code.
[gc] Comment around
[a] an entire (including the delimiters)
[}] bracketed scope
This one is a little more complex. gg is technically its own action however
as there is no 'entire file' text object, a motion to the top followed by an
action that acts until the end is often used. In this case the action is
reformatting the indentation. Similarly, ggVG will select the
entire file in a Visual block.
[g] Go to
[g] top of file and
[=] Reformat indentation
[G] until the end of the file
This command converts a list of vim-plug plugin entries into a Markdown list of links to the Github pages of each plugin. I selected this example as this was a command that I performed while creating this tutorial and to show that with practice Vim command composition becomes like a second language.
qaciw-<Esc>wcs']wyi]A(https://github.com/<Esc>pA)<Esc>j^q6@a
This command looks complex and impossible to memorise however very rarely will anyone recite a specific action like this. This would instead form naturally like a person describing the action. Look at the demonstration and description below and observe how with some slight annotation the command above reads like natural language.
[q] Record all following actions to
[a] register a.
[c] Change the
[i] inner
[w] word
[-] to "-"
[Esc] and return to normal mode.
[w] Go to the start of the next word.
[c] Change
[s] surrounding
['] single quotes to
[]] brackets (without padding).
[w] Go to the start of the next word.
[y] Yank (copy) everything within
[i] inner
[]] brackets.
[A] Append (to the end of the line with insert mode)
[(https://github.com/] "(https://github.com/"
[Esc] and return to normal mode.
[p] Paste everything in the buffer.
[A] Append (to the end of the line with insert mode)
[)] ")"
[Esc] and return to normal mode.
[j] Go down one line.
[^] Go to the start of the line.
[q] End recording.
[6] For 6 times,
[@] run the recording in
[a] register a.
Without the line by line it looks like the following.
Record all following actions to register a. Change the inner word to - and
return to normal mode. Go to the start of the next word. Change surrounding
single quotes to brackets (without padding). Go to the start of the next word.
Yank (copy) everything within inner brackets. Append (to the end of the line
with insert mode) (https://github.com/ and return to normal mode. Paste
everything in the buffer. Append (to the end of the line with insert mode) )
and return to normal mode. Go down one line. Go to the start of the line. End
recording. For 6 times, run the recording in register a.
Now that you have some familiarity with composing basic commands in Vim, when
trying to complete a task either in your head or out loud describe the steps
you need to perform and translate each sentence into actions. Much like
learning a new language, at first you will be reaching to find words to
use but as you build your vocabulary the ease with which you can express your
thoughts will continue to develop. In cases where you feel stuck, reach for a
cheat sheet or take advantage of
the :help command to find the command/word you are looking for.
