Practice Folder

First, we need to create an empty folder for our Vim practice.

Do that wherever you want, and cd into it.

$ mkdir hello-vim
$ cd hello-vim

By character

To move the cursor over by 1 character, instead of using the arrow keys, Vim uses the h, j, k, and l keys.

These are "character" Motion commands.

Here's a visualization of these key mappings:

Down  j
Up    k
Left  h
Right l

Another visualization:

             UP

             k
LEFT     h       l   RIGHT
             j

            DOWN

Yet another visualization:

                      UP
                      |
    LEFT --   h   j   k   l  -- RIGHT
                  |
                DOWN

By word

To move the cursor over by 1 word, there are "word" Motion commands.

This is instead of holding down the left or right "character" Motion keys (h or l).

NB. these will take us to the beginning of the word

w         next word
b         previous word     Back one word

Sometimes, you may want to move the cursor the the END of a WORD, instead of holding down h or l:

e         end of word

By page

To move the cursor up or down by 1 page, there are "page" Motion commands.

This is instead of using the scroll wheel on the mouse, or a trackpad.

CTRL-F    Forward one page
CTRL-B    Back one page

File position

We can also move the cursor relative to the file:

gg        Top of file (press <g> twice)
G         End of file (<SHIFT-g>)

Scroll

We can also scroll the screen, keeping the cursor on the current line.

zz        Scroll current line to middle of screen

zt        Scroll current line to Top of screen
zb        Scroll current line to Bottom of screen

Search / Find

We can search for the next occurence of a word

/hello<Enter>    Move cursor to next occurrence of "hello"
n                Move cursor to next occurrence of (current) search
N                Move cursor to Previous occurrence of (current) search

*                Move cursor to next occurrence of word under cursor
#                Move cursor to previous occurrence of word under cursor

Exercise

To practice our navigation commands, we need to grab the /exercises/02-navigation.md file from the repository for this tutorial.

Make sure you're in the hello-vim directory, and let's use curl to fetch that file.

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danielmoi/vim-tute/master/exercises/02-navigation.md

Open that file and navigate the path, using only keystrokes!

$ vim 02-navigation.md

Navigation