Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 54

Mark Your Place and Snap Back to It

Vim’s marks allow us to jump quickly to locations of interest within a document. We can set marks manually, but Vim also keeps track of certain points of interest for us automatically.

The m{a-zA-Z} command marks the current cursor location with the designated letter (mⓘ). Lowercase marks are local to each individual buffer, whereas uppercase marks are globally accessible. We’ll learn more about them in Tip 59. Vim does nothing to indicate that a mark has been set, but if you’ve done it right, then you should be able to jump directly to your mark with only two keystrokes from anywhere in the file.

Vim provides two Normal mode commands for jumping to a mark. (Pay attention—they look similar!) ’{mark} ...