14 Aug 2017

TIL more vim stuff

Marks and Jumps

I’ve been using marks for quite some time now and just learned about file jumps today. Marks make it super easy to move from different row and column positions in your file, simply use a single character to mark a location in your file you will want to move back to. Let’s use x so if we mark say line 90, column 20 with mx we can then use 'x to quickly move back to line 90 and if we want to move to the specific character we were on we can use `x to move the cursor onto line 90, column 20.

Now to something even better. I’ve always moved across many files to edit a few lines in a different file to test some small changes. Sometimes I’ll open the file in a new tab sometimes I’ll do it quick and open the file in place of my current file. Now if I want to open that file again I might open up my existing buffers or use NERDTree if it’s open or just use CtrlP to find it again. But replacing the current file actually counts as a vim jump. A jump is an action like searching, substituting, and marks. In a jump list vim will record the file column number and row number. To move back and forth between jumps in the jump list you can you <Ctrl-o> (previous) and <Ctrl-i> (next). This is pretty handy!

Opening stuff under the cursor

Moving your cursor over words gives you a number of options with normal commands like * which will search the word under the cursor for other matches in the file. What if the word under your cursor is a file path or a url? You can easily open them while still in vim! Use gf to open the file path in your vim session or use gx to open it with the default program respective to its filetype. Or use gx to open the url in your browser. Before I would copy and paste the url what a waste of time!

beep boop buhbye,
Jon Ho at 16:53