50+ Vim Tips and Tricks from Beginner to Expert

[@TheLinuxCast]

Two things. As Umka said below. yw will yank from the cursor position to the end of the word, similar to cw. Also, the first tip (vim filename + Line number ) seems to only work some of the time for some people. Very unreliable, and seems to depend a lot on your vimrc.

[@interakctif2540]

Your 1st tips seems incorrect: there should be no space between the `+` sign and the number. So, instead of `+ 34`, you should write it as `+34`. For sure it will work. 'Love from Indonesia'

[@mathiaslueer]

`vim .zshrc -c:100` will bring you directly to the line you want no matter what you have configured

[@jongeduard]

@@interakctif2540 I noticed it to. Space should not be there, otherwise it works perfectly. When I do it with a space, basically making it 2 separate command arguments for vim, the file is opened at the last line, just like in the video happened (I don't know why that happens by the way).

[@Gett37]

Use yaw to yank-a-word no matter where your cursor is. yaw, daw, caw are very useful

[@icetmzz9074]

Do you use qwerty or any other alternative layout?

[@CyberBoy8799]

As someone who is learning vim, I find this super useful. Great video!

[@sundarbe]

At 31:15, the | symbol means "or" in regular expression. You escape it with \ and get \|. So when you type "/word1\|word2" what you are saying is "Search (/) for *word1* or(\|) *word2*". After that you are using regular expression "^\s*$" what this means is that "From start of line (^) look for zero or more (*) space characters like tabs, space, carriage return, new line etc., (\s) till end of line($)", this pattern will match all empty lines.

[@nhojllahsram7808]

I had a big smile on my face when you admitted it was a lot at the end. things like vim are so amazing and wonderful to learn because you can STILL BE DISCOVERING TRICKS AFTER YEARS!!!(At least I am!) Anyways, keep on being awesome. Thank you so much for this. Really enjoyed learning.

[@no_name4796]

Yeah i used neovim for 2 years, and while i now can use it pretty fast, and know most thing, i costantly descover new bindings or command or things i never knew Like few days ago i randomly descover that ctrl+6 allows to switch to last used buffer. A very useful binding!

[@bjorn7696]

I learned a few things! 😀 But I also wanted to point out that in the sed like search and replace (:%s), the % means 'the whole document' and the 'g' means multiple replacements on 1 line. You can run it on just the current line without the %.

[@josephsmy1994]

"...and without the g means just the first match on the line" ;)

[@batchrocketproject4720]

Some useful stuff there, thanks for sharing. I watched over a few days, taking notes (in vim) and testing each as I went along. One or two didn't seem to work in my vim (some initially because I was not doing them properly), but it's still useful to know of the features for future reference when needed.

[@umka7536]

yw copies letters from cursor to the end of the word. Not full word. To copy full word in the middle of it: yiw. The same for changing. If you are in the middle of the word, then cw will delete part of word from cursor to the end of the word and goes into INSERT mode. To change word from any position in it - use ciw.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yeah, I always forget that y works like c. Thanks for that.

[@thingsiplay]

Also `ye` will only copy the word and `yw` will copy the word and the space.

[@gjermundification]

Nice to see vim tips by different people, there are always new attack vectors to learn.

[@crazychicken0378]

This video made me realize I don’t play around with vim enough. It needs to change, good vid

[@morty1317]

Great work!!!! Waiting for the next 50

[@TheLinuxCast]

I'm still exhausted from this one, LOL

[@ricardorien]

Vim videos are always welcome! Greetings from Venezuela.

[@iAmTheWagon]

Vim was painful at first, and I kept putting it off, but after building some muscle memory it became addictive and now I don't wanna use any other editor or IDE.

[@a_maxed_out_handle_of_30_chars]

1) 14:27, adding "g" to the substitute command does not change the word globally, the reason it changed was because of "%", which specifies the range and means entire document, what "g" actually does is, it changes multiple instances of the specified word on the same line. e.g: ``` lorem ipsum lorem lorem ipsum lorem ``` ":%s/lorem/what/gc", the "%" is range(global), "g" changes multiple instances i.e all "lorem" will changed to "what" on single line", and "c" is for confirmation, "y" to change "n" to skip and go to next instance :) 2) Also, "%" contains the filename of active buffer, so you could just ":source %" to source the current file, I mainly use it to run my bash/python script without opening another terminal e.g ``` #!/bin/bash echo hello ls ``` to execute I do, ":!chmod +x %" to give it executable permission and then either ":!./%" or ":!bash %" to execute it.

[@bjorn7696]

I already commented that! 😀

[@machman23]

Watched all the way through, I'm learning vim but emacs is what I use. I use Emacs more for journalising, note keeping and organizing so I might employ evil mode to gain some vim functions. Cool tips thankx

[@Pidgethate]

I love your approach man! Thank you for taking us with you during the exploration and explanation of vim. Regards from the Netherlands.

[@umka7536]

It is never enough VIM videos! Thanks!

[@skafiend4319]

:D my head exploded in the middle of the video, so I took a break. great video, thank you

[@nokiacthree809]

Thank you. Hi from India. appreciate your effort.

[@marcelangulo510]

I really apreciate all your videos. Thanks for sharing your knowledge

[@paulnuker1831]

It's better to use : instead of / for the substitute command, then it's not as confusing when you get a bunch of escaped characters. Easier to keep track of the different sections when there's a colon to look for 👍

[@go6obg92]

Thank you! I learned a lot. This really motivated me to keep learning VIM

[@JuanVqz]

16:53 you can use :source % where % means the current path to the file

[@matiasbpg]

Or so% for that matter!

[@emuel5844]

Such a valuable video for both beginners and experts!

[@jairunet]

Dude, excellent tutorial, very clear and with great references, I appreciate it, and keep up the good work. All the very best my man!

[@keithturnas6456]

g/ global ^\s*$ is regular expression (^ is beginning of line \s* is a line with 0 or more spaces $means end of line) /d is delete

[@Nukelover]

:g/^.\s$/d is a regular expression. It's saying from the beginning of the line (^), find all non-printing characters (.\s) all the way to the end of the line ($) and then delete all such lines globally (:g/.../d). The only thing that matches that expression are lines with nothing visible in them -- blank lines. Btw, gf was boss mode. :)

[@nomadvagabond1263]

Its not what he used. He used ^\s*$ which means to match any empty or a line that contains spaces. Urs look funny. It matches lines that contain any character followed by a space. (.) Means any 1 character including and space.

[@CyperN077]

Always some things to learn. Good video. I think I'll youtube-dl it for future reference.

[@hyperthreaded]

Actually the g in :%s/static/whatever/g makes the "s" command (which works on a line, not on the whole file) replace all occurrences of "static" on the *line* the command is working on, rather than just the first occurrence. The "%" at the beginning is the thing that applies the s command to all lines in the file. (if you leave out the %, s will only be run once, on the current line; or you could use e.g. .,$ instead of % to run the s command on all lines from the current line to the end of the file) So basically the expression before the "s" tells vim on which lines to apply the "s" command, and the letters behind the last "/" tell "s" what to do on each line it's applied to. It's kinda logical and makes sense, but it really takes some time to grok it all. 😎

[@RajinderYadav]

This was really helpful, I wrote my own cheat-sheet for the new stuff I learned I love you self dialouge 😂 ..we shouldn't have done 50

[@thedeparted_one]

I just wanted to say thank you.

[@maguilecutty]

C is actually cut which is incredible to realise cause copy asta becomes incredibly powerful

[@bg4801]

Thanks for this video. Need to learn vim and this is great. Im still trying to find a way to copy with the mouse in a terminal with two vertical panes and it only copies from one pane. =(

[@TheLinuxCast]

If you're talking about splits, the yy and p bindings will copy and paste between the two buffers.

[@mathiaslueer]

If you really want to learn vim forget that mouse exists mouse. to use the mouse is a anti pattern in vim ;) you can switch to visual mode with v(character), Shift+v(line) or Ctrl+v(column). mark what you wish to copy and press y to copy. Press Ctrl+w Ctrl+w to jump to the other split and press p to insert. thats it

[@xila8861]

Such a good tutorial.

[@windowsrefund]

Just so you have it handy, you can refine that global remove all blank lines with :g/^$/d The ^$ is just a regular expression matching lines that only contain a beginning (^) and end ($). All lines matching that regex of ^$ will be deleted as you've pointed out.

[@smsrivastava100]

Thanks for the tricks brother! Love from India

[@diegonavia1404]

I loved this video, Im learning vim and this is super fun. Greetings from Chile

[@jasonfreeman8022]

diw and daw. diw deletes all word characters from within the word regardless of cursor position. daw deletes all word characters and surrounding witespace (i.e. it is "all" inclusive). This is true for change, yank, visual selection, and likely some I'm forgetting. Alternate jump to line is 123G (123{shift}g). That will jump to line 123.

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

Well I did set and watch it all. Only nodded off once and I noticed my beard was longer... LOL As I was watching this I kept feeling you make this video for me. I know silly me while I'm special, I'm not that special. :-P I never get through the vimtutor I try and just give up, bad brain cells or something... Wow, 100 tips that scares the hell out of me both in commands and a 2 day video... Lol Thanks for the video Matt! LLAP

[@OliNorwell]

Great video, nice pace and well explained.

[@johndescy5814]

You can delete (or change or whatever) inside a word like you change inside brackets or braces. Just add i to your command. diw deletes the word you are in the middle of.

[@jd-dev]

Thank you! I learned so much

[@iAmTheWagon]

Excellent information and presentation

[@johndescy5814]

!sort calls sort on the shell. However Vim has it's own builtin sort fuction, so the ! is not necessary. Furthermore sort n will sort numerically.

[@fahimabrar2922]

Do a live stream on how to configure & rice vim/ neovim please.

[@ke30_]

Thank you for this, very helpful!

[@FrasSmith]

Some great tips here. I've been using vim and before that vi for almost 30 years now and I'm still learning new tricks. :-) My best vi story however comes from the early 90s. A programmer colleague was showing off his newly learned juggling skills at work one day. It turns out that he wasn't as good as he thought and one of his juggling balls fell and bounced off his keyboard. 5 5 d d. Oops.

[@rism8345]

Exactly what I needed. Thanks!

[@anjalimesh]

Excellent work

[@seaseasee]

appreciate the great effort

[@maguilecutty]

Also when u realise every action can be done w every motion. Ie cb cuts the word behind the cursor, dh deletes the letter to the left. Also action a is also rad. Cut around { ca{ will cut your whole function

[@mazharkhaliq1971]

Thanks

[@MajinHico]

Thank you

[@V7x]

w = one word forward and b = one word back!

[@lubeckable]

esta bonito tu terminal compa

[@jeffreymagedanz8130]

ZZ - To my frustration, I regularly quit vim by accident, and could never figure out why. Watching this video, I realized that ZZ is what I've been accidentally typing all along.

[@jsteins]

@@jeffreymagedanz8130 ZZ is a quick way to "put file to Sleep" equiv to ":wq" but faster to type. This feature has been available since early "vi" on BSD, AIX, or Sun Solaris in the 1980s.

[@keithturnas6456]

Great video!!! I learned much

[@mohammedalbatati5529]

Many thanks, that was great informative video

[@derFeind]

very very helpful thank you!

[@sepehralimohamadi5310]

This was amazing, thank you for very helpful video

[@Skatox]

Nice video! I loved it.

[@ebmpinyuri]

good video , very helpful

[@markring40]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

[@TheLinuxCast]

You're welcome.

[@SharifTarek]

thanks a lot ya pro

[@EPICfranky]

very useful!

[@Codigger-br2rt]

Recently, it was discovered that there was a significant delay in opening vim. log the opening process of vim, found that the total time is 603.661 ms, the time is sorted (sort-nrk 2), I found that opening buffers and VimEnter autocommands take a large proportion of time. The value is above 100ms. How to optimize this problem?

[@BluePhantomGames]

yw,cw,ci and dw was very useful

[@lohanguedes6413]

Keep on the good work man! live your videos! I would love to see one about gimp or photogimp

[@gjermundification]

0:04 You mean insert mode? Where vim behaves like a text editor.

[@alexisbatyk6301]

¡Gracias!

[@TheLinuxCast]

¡De nada! ¡Gracias por el Súper Gracias!

[@hasanalattar9561]

u can count the tips using vim

[@zeocamo]

:source % ... source the current file ... or :so % do the same thing edit: for many of us that use lua now, it is :luafile %

[@zeocamo]

@Terminalforlife (LL) yes that is true, things like plugin systems, don't like to be loaded again and again ... and now i gluss it is more like :luafile % ... because we all convert to lua by now

[@VulcanOnWheels]

2:09 I believe the problem you're having because of the space between the + and the number. If you don't add the space it should work. 7:30 They're called braces. 26:28 That's in ascending order. I see you uploaded this video about a year ago. I hope you have overcome your nervousness since then. 27:23 Not really, because Vim did exactly what you told it to do; it saved the file under the new name. 31:11 Maybe Derek Taylor aka Distrotube can tell you. 32:54 You don't need the + here.

[@intermsofreality]

Useful stuff but would've probably been better served in chunks of separate videos. No way I'm going to remember all of this in a single sitting.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yeah, if I were to ever do more, they'd be in a smaller video. I did another with 10 tricks. This one took way too much time and you're right it's hard to digest.

[@oneanime5551]

amazing!

[@xydez]

31:11 it's regex

[@TheRealFrankWizza]

My arrow keys type letters in vim. As such I don't use it. I know that can be changed, but I haven't bothered. I use nano.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Mine do too. That's why I use the vim keys.

[@TheRealFrankWizza]

@@TheLinuxCast Fair enough. I should probably check out a VIM basics tutorial and jump back to this.

[@ККЂК-р4щ]

Can u provide pdf of theses commands

[@penvzila]

As someone who has used vi and vim for almost 30 years I have one tip: don't fucking bother with it. Know how to use it. But don't force yourself to use it when you don't need to.

[@ArtemCYOU]

у меня уходит около 4-5 часов на съёмку одного видео без остановки, но спасибо за выпуск)

[@thegameoflife9179]

Vim can clean your bathroom... just press cb in Normal mode

[@peterkilian9100]

emacs is better. anyone who has “tried” emacs but “stuck with vim” either didn’t actually try emacs or are painfully ignorant. GUI will always trump TUI. That’s the reality. Vim is my favourite text editor but it really pisses me off when people act like it’s better than emacs when it just isn’t at all 😅

[@Gett37]

For some reason this video is not in your vim playlist

[@TheLinuxCast]

The video was created before the playlist. I'll add it to it now

[@TrueWordsOfEternity]

R u the new prime :)

[@gokulp6878]

How to select some group of of lines in visual block mode .For example, I have 1000 lines of code I want to select only 500 to 700 lines (without scroll the mouse).Please explain

[@aryakiran256]

emacs4life

[@mehdikhawari8830]

Most of vim-users end up switching to emacs

[@umka7536]

Not really. :)

[@oneanime5551]

why?

[@bjorn7696]

I've been a vi/vim/nvim user for 22 years... When do you recon my due date to switch to emacs is?

[@MrCradleman]

@Terminalforlife (LL) Never say never) I also thought so) But I tried emacs + evil and this is so much customizable, vim will never have such customization level)

[@leonvolq6179]

Not sure If your trolling or not but that was funny 😂

[@ChrisCox-wv7oo]

:g/^\s*$/d ^ is beginning of line anchor \s is any whitespace character * is quantifier meaning 0 or more $ is end of line anchor Delete all lines that have 0 or more white space, and they have no other characters

[@christopherexline6247]

Should be: vim +34 config.def.h

[@christopherexline6247]

could also be vim config.def.h +34: no space between plus and the number

[@Gett37]

This is awesome and very useful, thank you