Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Moving Around Windows (Getting Your Cursor from Here to There)

It’s easy to move from window to window with a mouse in both gvim and Vim. gvim supports clicking with the mouse by default, whereas in Vim you can enable the behavior with the mouse option. A good default setting for Vim is :set mouse=a, to activate the mouse for all uses: command line, input, and navigation.

If you don’t have a mouse, or prefer to control your session from the keyboard, Vim provides a full set of navigation commands to move quickly and accurately among session windows. Happily, Vim uses the mnemonic prefix keystroke ^W consistently for window navigation. The keystroke that follows defines the motion or other action, and should be familiar to experienced vi and Vim users because they map closely to the same motion commands for editing.

Rather than describe each command and its behavior, we will consider an example. The command-synopsis table should then be self-explanatory.

To move from the current Vim window to the next one, type CTRL-W j (or CTRL-W <down> or CTRL-W CTRL-J). The CTRL-W is the mnemonic for “window” command, and the j is analogous to Vim’s j command, which moves the cursor to the next line.

Table 11-2 summarizes the window navigation commands.

Note

As with many Vim and vi commands, these can be multiply executed by prefixing them with a count. For example, 3^Wj tells Vim to jump to the third window down from the current window.

Table 11-2: Window navigation commands

Mnemonic Tips

t and b are ...