Vim Editor in Linux & Commands

Vim is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program for Unix. It is an advanced highly configured text editor built to enable efficient text editing. Vim text editor is developed by Bram Moolenaar. It supports most file types and the vim editor is also known as a programmer’s editor.

Installation of Vim in Linux System

To install vim on Linux like Ubuntu run this command:

sudo apt-get install vim

To install vim on an arch-based distro run this command:

sudo pacman -S vim

You can open the vim terminal by this command:

vim

You can see all commands, and their documentation by help use the following commands :

:help

Exit from the terminal type this command:

:q!

To open a file in vim use this command:

vim filename.txt

then the file will open.

For writing into the file:

i

Changing mode from one to another :

• Text Entry Commands :

a - Append text in following the current cursor position
A - Append text to the end of current line
i - Insert text before the current cursor position
I - Insert text at the beginning of the cursor line
o - Open up a new line following the current line and add text there
O - Open up a new line in front of the current line and add text                  there

Command mode (Where you give commands to the editor to get things done . Press ESC for command mode)

• Cursor movement :

h - move cursor left
j - move cursor down
k - move cursor up
l - move cursor right
H - move to top of screen
M - move to the middle of screen
L - move to bottom of screen
w - jump forwards to the start of a word
W - jump forwards to the start of a word (words can contain punctuation)
e - jump forwards to the end of a word
E - jump forwards to the end of a word (words can contain punctuation)
b - jump backwards to the start of a word
B - jump backwards to the start of a word (words can contain punctuation)
ge - jump backwards to the end of a word
gE - jump backwards to the end of a word (words can contain punctuation)
0 - jump to the start of the line
^ - jump to the first non-blank character of the line
$ - jump to the end of the line
g_ - jump to the last non-blank character of the line
gg - go to the first line of the document
G - go to the last line of the document
5gg or 5G - go to line 5
gd - move to the local declaration
gD - move to global declarationtx - jump to before next occurrence of character x

• Exiting commands in Vim:

:q - To exit without doing anything
:q! - To exit without saving  changes
:wq - To exit with saving changes

• Text Deletion Commands:

dd — delete (cut) a line
2dd — delete (cut) 2 lines
dw — delete (cut) the characters of the word from the cursor position to the start of the next word
diw — delete (cut) word under the cursor
daw — delete (cut) word under the cursor and the space after or before it
D — delete (cut) to the end of the line
d$ — delete (cut) to the end of the line
x — delete (cut) character

• Yank has most of the options of delete:

yy - yank current line
y$ - yank to end of current line from cursor
yw - yank from cursor to end of current word
5yy - yank, for example, 5 lines

• The paste used after delete or yank to recover lines:

p - paste below cursor
P - paste above cursor
"2p - paste from buffer 2 (there are 9)
u - Undo last change
U - Restore line
J - Join next line down to the end of the current line

Delete all the lines in vim:

Esc + gg + dG

• File Manipulation Commands

:w - Write workspace to original file
:W - file Write workspace to named file
:e - file Start editing a new file
:r - file Read contents of a file to the workspace

Search:

:/word - To search the word After the cursor uses the backslash key and then write the word and press enter.
:n - Use n to move on next matching word
:N -Use N to move on previous matching word

Search and Replace:

:s/searchword/replaceword/ - To replace the word in file use s/ command in vim like
:s/searchword/replaceword/g - To do replace all occurrence of word use g