Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 34

Recall Commands from History

Vim records the commands that we enter in Command-Line mode and provides two ways of recalling them: scrolling through past command-lines with the cursor keys or dialing up the command-line window.

Vim keeps a history of our activity in Command-Line mode. We can easily recall previous commands, so there’s no need to type out a long Ex command at the prompt more than once.

To begin with, let’s switch to Command-Line mode by pressing the : key. Leave the prompt empty; then press the <Up> arrow key. The command line should be populated with the most recent Ex command that we executed. We can use the <Up> key again to go further back through our Ex command history or use the <Down> key to go in the opposite ...