vi (aka vim) tutorial, tips, tricks and useful commands

vi (aka vim) tutorial, tips, tricks and useful commands
Where grep came from (RE being Regular Expression):
:g/RE/p
Delete lines 10 to 20 inclusive:
:10,20d
or with marks a and b:
:'a,'bd
Delete lines that contain pattern:
:g/pattern/d
Delete all empty lines:
:g/^$/d
Delete lines in range that contain pattern:
:20,30/pattern/d
or with marks a and b:
:'a,'b/pattern/d
Substitute all lines for first occurance of pattern:
:%s/pattern/new/
:1,$s/pattern/new/
Substitute all lines for pattern globally (more than once on the line):
:%s/pattern/new/g
:1,$s/pattern/new/g
Find all lines containing pattern and then append -new to the end of each line:
:%s/\(.*pattern.*\)/\1-new/g
Substitute range:
:20,30s/pattern/new/g
with marks a and b:
:'a,'bs/pattern/new/g
Swap two patterns on a line:
:s/\(pattern1\)\(pattern2\)/\2\1/
Capitalize the first lowercase character on a line:
:s/\([a-z]\)/\u\1/
more concisely:
:s/[a-z]/\u&/
Capitalize all lowercase characters on a line:
:s/\([a-z]\)/\u\1/g
more concisely:
:s/[a-z]/\u&/g
Capitalize all characters on a line:
:s/\(.*\)/\U\1\E/
Capitalize the first character of all words on a line:
:s/\<[a-z]/\u&/g
Uncapitalize the first character of all words on a line:
:s/\<[A-Z]/\l&/g
Change case of character under cursor:
~
Change case of all characters on line:
g~~
Change case of remaining word from cursor:
g~w
Increment the number under the cursor:

Decrement the number under the cursor:

redraw:

Turn on line numbering:
:set nu
Turn it off:
:set nonu
Number lines (filter the file through a unix command and replace with output):
:%!cat -n
Sort lines:
:%!sort
Sort and uniq:
:%!sort -u
Read output of command into buffer:
:r !ls -l
Refresh file from version on disk:
:e!
Open a new window:
n
Open a new window with the same file (split):
s
Split window vertically:
v
Close current window:
c
:q
Make current window the only window:
o
Cycle to next window:
w
Move to window below current window:
j
Move to window above current window:
k
Move to window left of current window:
h
Move to window right of current window:
l
Set textwidth for automatic line-wrapping as you type:
:set textwidth=80
Turn on syntax highlighting
:syn on
Turn it off:
:syn off
Force the filetype for syntax highlighting:
:set filetype=python
:set filetype=c
:set filetype=php
Use lighter coloring scheme for a dark background:
:set background=dark
Htmlize a file using the current syntax highlighting:
:so $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/2html.vim
Or, htmlize from a command prompt:
in 2html.sh put:
#!/bin/sh
vim -n -c ':so $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/2html.vim' -c ':wqa' $1 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
Now just run: shell> 2html.sh foo.py
Document originally from http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~luca/tricks.vim.html
updated and maintained by Greg Lawler
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