Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 49

Move Word-Wise

Vim has two speeds for moving backward and forward word-wise. Both allow for a more rapid traversal than moving by one column at a time.

Vim provides a handful of motions that let us move the cursor forward and backward by one word at a time (see word-motionsⓘ). They’re summarized in this table:

Command	Move Cursor
w	Forward to start of next word
b	Backward to start of current/previous word
e	Forward to end of current/next word
ge	Backward to end of previous word

We can think of these motions as coming in pairs: the w and b commands both target the start of a word, while the e and ge commands target the end of a word. w and e both advance the cursor forward, while b and ge move the cursor backward. This matrix of word-wise ...