Practical Vim

Tip 55

Traverse the Jump List

Vim records our location before and after making a jump and provides a couple of commands for retracing our steps.

In web browsers, we’re used to using the back button to return to pages that we visited earlier. Vim provides a similar feature by way of the jump list: the <C-o> command is like the back button, while the complementary <C-i> command is like the forward button. These commands allow us to traverse Vim’s jump list, but what exactly is a jump?

Let’s start by making this distinction: motions move around within a file, whereas jumps can move between files (although we’ll soon see that some motions are also classified as jumps). We can inspect the contents of the jump list by running this command: