How to Vim: Jump Around

One of the most important aspects of effective editing is to be able to quickly move where you want to go in a buffer - e.g. to a specific line, paragraph, character, word, etc.

When it comes to navigating within the current line in Vim, motion commands like f/F and t/T are very widely used. They basically allow you to navigate the occurances of a character backwards/forward. (you can cycle through multiple matches with ; and ,)

Like many things in Vim, those are composable with operators like d, c, etc, which makes them quite powerful. Consider the example below (where | denotes the curson position):

|this text is completely useless; but this text isn't

If you’d like to delete the useless text you can do this quite fast by pressing df;. Good stuff!

Sadly, however, this wouldn’t work in the situation below:

|this text is completely useless
this text is completely useless
this text is completely useless; but this text isn't

How to delete all the text from our cursor position on the first line to the ; on the third? / (search) to the rescue! I think many people newer to Vim don’t realize that search works like a motion and can be combined with editing operations. Try typing d/; <RET> and see what happens!

It gets even better! Imagine a slightly more complicated situation:

|this text is completely useless;
this text is completely useless;
this text is completely useless; but this text isn't

Here we can either repeat the previous action d/; 3 times (. is our friend) or use C-g (next match) and C-t (previous match) to rotate the possible matches before pressing <RET> to confirm our target. Try typing d/;<C-t><C-t><C-t><RET>.

Note: The above will work only if you’ve enabled incsearch, which pretty much everyone should do anyways.

Of course, here I’m just scratching the surface of the many ways to jump around a buffer in Vim. I think those built-ins can get you pretty far if you master them, but on tops of this there are plenty of plugins that:

• Extend commands like f/t to work across multiple lines
• Allow you to jump to any place in the window by pressing a couple of characters (e.g. EasyMotion and its million clones)¹

What are your favorite ways to quickly jump around in Vim? Please share those in the comments!

That’s all I have for you today! Vim long and prosper!

1. I’m partial for flash in Neovim and vim-sneak in “classic” Vim. ↩