Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Moving Windows Around

You can move windows two ways in Vim. One way simply swaps the windows on the screen. The other way changes the actual window layouts. In the first case, window sizes remain constant while windows change position on the screen. In the second case, windows not only move but are resized to fill the position to which they’ve moved.

Moving Windows (Rotate or Exchange)

Three commands move windows without modifying layout. Two of these rotate the windows positionally in one direction (to the right or down) or the other (to the left or up), and the other one exchanges the position of two possibly nonadjacent windows. These commands operate only on the row or column in which the current window lives.

CTRL-Wr rotates windows to the right or down. Its complement is CTRL-WR, which rotates windows in the opposite direction.

An easier way to imagine how these work is to think of a row or column of Vim windows as a one-dimensional array. CTRL-W r would shift each element of the array one position to the right, and move the last element into the vacated first position. CTRL-W R simply moves the elements the other direction.

If there are no windows in a column or row that aligns with the current window, this command does nothing.

After Vim rotates the windows, the cursor remains in the window from which the rotate command executed; thus, the cursor moves with the window.

CTRL-Wx and CTRL-WCTRL-X let you exchange two windows in a row or column of windows. By default, Vim exchanges ...