Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#1

Post by irishmansevilla » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 9:47 AM UTC

:earlier 10m → Moves your buffer state 10 minutes earlier. :later 5m → Moves your buffer state 5 minutes later.

Why it's helpful: It acts like a time machine for your edits! If you regret changes but don’t want to undo manually, you can jump back in time.

You can also use it with changes, e.g., :earlier 5c (5 changes earlier).

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#2

Post by pizza » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

not a shortcut but still tremendously useful when I need it:

    # open some files in vertical splits

    > ls $FILES | nvim -O

    # -o does horizontal splits

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#3

Post by croo » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

I never know what is lesser known but my faviourite is: * searches for the word under the cursor, # searches backwards. You can also use n for next and N for previous hit.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#4

Post by riddley » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

pizza wrote: post #2

not a shortcut but still tremendously useful when I need it: # open some files in vertical splits > ls $FILES | nvim -O # -o does horizontal splits

nvim -o $FILES

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#5

Post by riddley » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

When I'm showing people the power of vim, I often use the `i` verb, like `ci"` and how it's not a "shortcut" but instead a sentence: change in quotes. If you start thinking about vim as a language instead of a collection of things to memorize, it becomes much easier, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#6

Post by scrapheap » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

Favorite is hard, but if you use vim and don't know that `.` repeats the last change then you're missing out. It's really useful for those times where you need to make the same change in lots of places in a file, but not everywhere.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#7

Post by zeke » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

:Lexplore opens a split window with a directory listing you can navigate.

:33Lexplore opens the split with a slimmer, 33% width, window. :Lex to autocomplete if you do not want to type as much.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#8

Post by tmaly » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

sometimes when I copy data into a file, I get some blank lines depending on how the data was formatted. This can often happen when copying from websites.

I find this shortcut useful to delete all blank lines in a file

:g/^$/d

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#9

Post by kkoncevicius » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:27 PM UTC

Maybe one lesser known is changing to visual mode within operation. A few examples (^ marks the cursor):

    one two three
                ^

'db' would leave letter "e" behind. But 'dvb' would include the "e" as well.

Another example, say we want to delete from "two" to "five".

    one
    two
     ^
    three
    four
    five
    six

'd/five' would leave a "t" as well as "five", but 'dV/five' would delete all necessary lines. This helps targeting lines without using relative line numbers.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

#10

Post by btschaegg » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

tmaly wrote: post #8

sometimes when I copy data into a file, I get some blank lines depending on how the data was formatted. This can often happen when copying from websites. I find this shortcut useful to delete all blank lines in a file :g/^$/d

To add to this, I would say :g in combination with :norm would be my choice.

Edit: Oh, also, since vim ships with xxd: xxd -r -p is a very useful thing to know.