How to Vim: Using Effectively the Command History

One of the frustrating aspects of Vim for me is that in insert mode you’re quite limited in what you can do. That’s fine most of the time, except when you’re in command-line mode (meaning you’re typing something like :s). In command-line mode there’s no way to switch to normal mode, so if you make a typo or want to edit a command you’ve previous invoked that’s a bit painful.

Recently I’ve discovered a way to mitigate the problem - namely the command history window. (see :h cmdwin for details) You can trigger in a couple of ways:

• Press : and afterwards do a Ctrl-F
• Press q:

When the command history window opens you can edit its contents like any other buffer and normally you’d find some command that’s of interest to you, perhaps edit it, and afterwards press RET to run it. You can also close the window with either :q or Ctrl-C.

Note, that the command history window is special and while you’re in it you can’t really move around (e.g. switch to another window with Ctrl-W W)

For me the main use of the command history window is to reuse and tweak longer :s and :g commands, but I can imagine it having other uses as well. It’s certainly a good addition to any Vimmer’s tool belt.

Going to back to the original problem I posted - how do you fix a typo while entering some command? Imagine you wrote the following:

:s%/foo/bar/gc

Just press Ctrl-F and you can instantly fix the command in the command window. Now you can just do a ^xp (remember you’re in normal mode) and press RET to fire the fixed command.

:%s/foo/bar/gc

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

P.S. If only Vim’s insert mode supported readline’s keybindings or something similar… You can, however, get something similar using plugins like rsi.vim and readline.vim.