Vim Visual Cheat Sheet

Serge Y. Stroobandt

Copyright 2016, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

Home
IT
Content Writing
Vim Cheat Sheet

This document is still under construction.

Introduction

Vim (and vi for that matter) is renowned for its notoriously steep learning curve.

Comparison of editor learning curves Source:

This should not scare you off. If you have not done so yet, first read “Why I Use Vim” If you cannot bother reading it, here is my personal break down.

No, this is not an extreme case of fanboyhood. Vim is a way of life, or rather, a means towards extreme levels of productivity with the Vim–Markdown–Pandoc–make input combo with any of the LaTeX/ConTeXt/XHTML/Prince/DZSlides back‑ends.

Among other things, Vim will teach you to use a keyboard professionally; keeping your index fingers stuck to the home row. Vim allows you to edit texts lightning fast without resorting to any computer mouse or other pointing device. Imagine the space you will gain on the folding table on your next transatlantic business flight! You will no longer have to use the Home, End or arrow keys, if you chose so.

vi gang sign: Vim’s predecessor vi has been around since 1976 and has been continuously improved ever since. If computer application has been around for such an extended period in time, for sure, there must be a good reason to it! Are you not curious towards experiencing for yourself why?

My interest in Vim grew out of my annoyance with other text editors not recognising words, parenthesis, brackets, etc. I got fed up with manually tapping the cursor to the desired editing position. Vim is one of the few text editors which is a word processor in the true sense of the word. It is a word processor which effectively recognises word, bracket and parenthesis boundaries, counts words, etc.

Vim continuously records a small macro of your last command combination, which is easily accessible through the dot . key. Don’t be deceived; this functionality is far more powerful than the usual repeat function!

Visual Cheat Sheet

For English keyboards

Vim visual cheat sheet for English keyboards

For German keyboards

Vim visual cheat sheet for German keyboards

Tutorial

vi/vim graphical cheat sheet tutorial

Vi/vim graphical cheat sheet tutorial

Vim game

VIM Adventures

From here on

By now, you might have Vim is actually a word processor which you can easily modify and/or extend yourself.

In other applications

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution‑NonCommercial‑ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Other licensing available on request.

Unless otherwise stated, all originally authored software on this site is licensed under the terms of GNU GPL version 3.

This static web site has no backend database.
Hence, no personal data is collected and GDPR compliance is met.
Moreover, this domain does not set any first party cookies.

All Google ads shown on this web site are, irrespective of your location,
restricted in data processing to meet compliance with the CCPA and GDPR.
However, Google AdSense may set third party cookies for traffic analysis and
use JavaScript to obtain a unique set of browser data.
Your browser can be configured to block third party cookies.
Furthermore, installing an ad blocker like EFF's Privacy Badger
will block the JavaScript of ads.
Google's ad policies can be found here.

This page employs a