Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 50

Find by Character

Vim’s character search commands allow us to move quickly within a line, and they work beautifully in Operator-Pending mode.

The f{char} command is one of the quickest methods of moving around in Vim. It searches for the specified character, starting with the cursor position and continuing to the end of the current line. If a match is found, then the cursor advances to the specified character. If no match is found, then the cursor stays put (see fⓘ).

That may sound complex, but it’s quite simple in practice. Observe:

Keystrokes	Buffer Contents
{start}	Find the first occurrence of {char} and move to it.
fx	Find the first occurrence of {char} and move to it.
fo	Find the first occurrence of {char} and move to it. ...