Practical Vim

Tip 56

Traverse the Change List

Vim records the location of our cursor after each change we make to a document. Traversing this change list is simple and can be the quickest way to get where we want to go.

Have you ever used the undo command followed immediately by redo? The two commands cancel each other out, but they have the side effect of placing the cursor on the most recent change. That could be useful if we wanted to jump back to the part of the document that we edited most recently. It’s a hack, but u<C-r> gets us there.

It turns out that Vim maintains a list of the modifications we make to each buffer during the course of an editing session. It’s called the change list (see changelist​), and we can inspect its contents by running ...