Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 8th Edition

Chapter 14. Some Vim Power Techniques

This chapter demonstrates some of the lessons learned over many (too many?) years learning and using Vim. Tweaking some defaults and remapping default commands make hours-long daily use of Vim much more pleasurable. We hope that these ideas and techniques will nudge you to new ideas and cause you to create your own power techniques.

Several Convenience Maps

Command mode in Vim has enough actions and commands that hardly any keys are available to freely use without changing the default behavior. Fortunately, Vim mostly gets it right, and while you may or may not initially agree with its choices, you almost always quickly develop muscle memory for the commands you like to use.

We have picked some convenient alternatives by replacing mappings that either didn’t make sense, were redundant and served by more than one key, or were better served by simply mapping them to something more useful.

Exiting Vim Simplified

Way back in the section “Saving and Exiting Files”, we introduced the several options for exiting vi and Vim. As was demonstrated in Figure 5-1, not everyone gets it the first time. Indeed, “How to exit the Vim editor?” is one of the most popular questions on Stack Overflow, having been asked by more than one million users!

We can easily reduce the three or four keystrokes needed to exit Vim to just one, using these simple key remappings:

:nmap q :q<cr>
:nmap Q :q!<cr>

:nmap is a variant of the standard ex :map command. Vim has multiple ...