Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 8

Chunk Your Undos

In other text editors, invoking the undo command after typing a few words might revert the last typed word or character. However, in Vim we can control the granularity of the undo command.

The u key triggers the undo command, which reverts the most recent change. A change could be anything that modifies the text in the document. That includes commands triggered from Normal, Visual, and Command-Line modes, but a change could also encompass any text entered (or deleted) in Insert mode. So we could also say that i{insert some text}<Esc> constitutes a change.

In nonmodal text editors, triggering the undo command after typing a few words could do one of two things. It could undo the last character that was typed. Or, more ...