VIM: My Personal Cheat Sheet

Movement

Operational

Command Mode

Press : to enter command mode.

Mouse Support

Allows you to scroll around and position cursor on screen.

On Linux, set :set mouse=a which should work out of the box, even in WSL via Windows Terminal.

On Windows version of vim this doesn’t work at all and I haven’t found solution yet (other than using gVim).

Update: Mouse actually works quite well in Windows. The issue was with using scoop to install vim. I’d recommend avoiding “scoop” in future as it has endless number of bad issues with other software too.

Editing

Selection

Also called Visual Mode.

Copy/Paste

Search

Basic search - type / then keep typing search phrase and when happy press enter. Move between occurrences with n (next) and N (previous, reverse of Next).

To turn on case-insensitive search - :set ic. ic stands for ignore case. To switch off - :set noic.

To highlight all the matches in yellow, allowing you to scan the file easily, type :set hlsearch.

To list all the matches - :g/.

Use vimgrep (short command is called vim which is confusing) for more advanced search (tutorial). In short:

:vim search_pattern filename_pattern. For instance, to search all files in all directories for a word test use :vim test **.

Replace

Basic replace

Use “substitute” command (:s) such as:

:s/foo/bar

Which will replace the first occurrence of “foo” with “bar”. Add g (“globally”) flag to replace them all in the current line:

:s/foo/bar/g

To replace in the entire file, add %. So the most common command you will use is actually

:%s/foo/bar/g

Multiple “Viewports”

When in NERDTree, you can use t to open a file in a new tab, or T to open it silently in a new tab.

HEX Mode

Vim can be used as a hex viewer - :%!xxd.

Useful Customisations

Display line numbers

set number

will add column with absolute line numbers

Enable Folding

set foldmethod=indent
set foldnestmax=10
set nofoldenable
set foldlevel=1

Use zo to open fold, and zc to close fold, za to toggle fold.

Folding wiki.

Select Colour Scheme

Start typing :colorscheme<space><tab> which displays list of colour schemes you can try immediately:

When happy, put it in .vimrc like :colorscheme <name>.

gVim

Not entirely sure why someone would use gVim, other than to use fonts different to console one. To customise gVim, you need to create ~/.gvimrc (gvim loads normal ~/.vimrc then merges ~/.gvimrc). Mine looks like this:

# set default colorschema (gVim specific)
:colorscheme desert
# set default UI font
set guifont=Cascadia_Code:h10

# lines and columns (basically window size, depending on font)
set lines=35
set columns=125

set go -=m # disable UI menu
set go -=T # disable UI toolbar

Windows Specific

Set PowerShell Core (PowerShell 7) as vim shell:

" make powershell a vim shell
set shell=pwsh.exe
set shellcmdflag=-command
set shellquote=\"
set shellxquote=

Plugins

There are many options, but I prefer vim-plug for managing plugins. It’s small and easy to use.

Quickstart

curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

vim ~/.vimrc

call plug#begin()

Plug '...whateveryouinstall..'

call plug#end()

Commands

:PlugUpgrade - upgrade vim-plug itself.

:PlugUpdate - install missing (new) plugins, upgrade existing.

:PlugClean - physically clean out plugins from disk that were removed from .vimrc.

Useful Plugins

To discover new plugins, use VimAwesome.

Markdown preview

markdown-preview is a great plugin for markdown html preview integration. Make sure you have node and yarn installed (markdown is web tech) then install with plug:

Plug 'iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim', { 'do': 'cd app && yarn install'  }

Use :MarkdownPreview command to start preview. It even supports scroll sync!

Easymotion

easymotion allows to navigate a bit faster. Install:

Plug 'easymotion/vim-easymotion'

The simplest action is jump to a character on screen:

    Default Mapping      | Details
    ---------------------|----------------------------------------------
    <Leader>f{char}      | Find {char} to the right.

By pressing that, plugin highlights occurences and shortcuts.

Programming

Check out vim-lsp and vim-lsp-settings. The first one adds support for LSP, the second one simplifies installing LSP servers when they are not found.

Servers are installed by default to $HOME/.local/share/vim-lsp-settings/servers or %LOCALAPPDATA%\vim-lsp-settings\servers. You can use asyncomplete.vim to enable code completion, and asyncomplete-lsp.vim to make vim-lsp a data source for completion

vim-plug config:

Plug 'prabirshrestha/vim-lsp'
Plug 'mattn/vim-lsp-settings'
Plug 'prabirshrestha/asyncomplete.vim'
Plug 'prabirshrestha/asyncomplete-lsp.vim'

and to make tab to complete:

inoremap <expr> <Tab>   pumvisible() ? "\<C-n>" : "\<Tab>"
inoremap <expr> <S-Tab> pumvisible() ? "\<C-p>" : "\<S-Tab>"
inoremap <expr> <cr>    pumvisible() ? asyncomplete#close_popup() : "\<cr>"

flatbuffers

Syntax highlighting for Google Flatbuffers:

Plug 'zchee/vim-flatbuffers'

Check Also

• https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client (requires vim with python support)

Common Issues

Some commands return a message “sorry, this command is not available in this version…”. This is because many Linux distros embed a basic vim version. You need to install vim package (i.e. sudo apt install vim).