Neovim tips and life hacks that significantly improved my productivity

11 September, 2024

I've been using Neovim for quite some time and have went through the entire Wiki. I would like to share some of my most loved tricks that have really skyrocketed my productivity.

Basic Navigation

• h, l ~ Move left, right by one character
• j, k ~ Move down, up by one line
• +, - ~ Move to the next/previous non-whitespace character on the line
• ^ ~ Move to the first non-whitespace character
• _ ~ Move to the first character on the line (also takes a count)
• $ ~ Move to the last character on the line
• G ~ Move to the end of the file
• gg ~ Move to the beginning of the file
• 40gg ~ Jump to line 40
• % ~ Jump to matching parenthesis or bracket
• t{char} ~ Jump before the next occurrence of {char}
• f{char} ~ Jump to the next occurrence of {char}
• T{char} / F{char} ~ Reverse of t and f
• , and ; ~ Repeat t, T, f, F in opposite/same direction

Searching

• /pattern ~ Search forward
• ?pattern ~ Search backward
• # and * ~ Search for the identifier under the cursor (backward/forward)
• /pattern/e ~ Place cursor on last character of pattern
• /pattern/e+1 ~ Place cursor one character to the right of match
• /apple\C ~ Case-sensitive search
• :%s/pattern//n ~ Count occurrences of pattern
• /\%V ~ Search inside visual selection

Editing

• i, I ~ Insert at cursor / start of line
• a, A ~ Append after cursor / end of line
• gi ~ Insert at last edit position
• o, O ~ Open new line below / above and enter insert mode
• r{char} ~ Replace character under cursor
• J ~ Join line with next one
• gJ ~ Join lines without inserting space
• xp ~ Swap two characters
• D, Y, C ~ Instead of d$, y$, c$
• gq ~ Wrap long lines

Case Modification

• guu / gUU / g~~ ~ Make current line lowercase, uppercase, or toggle case
• gu, gU, g~ ~ Operator to change case

Copying & Deleting

• yy / dd ~ Yank/Delete entire line
• yib ~ Yank inside ()
• d/hello ~ Delete until "hello"
• d/hello/e ~ Delete up to and including "hello"
• dk / dj ~ Delete current and previous/next line
• gp / gP ~ Paste like p / P but leave cursor after pasted text

Visual Mode Tricks

• CTRL v ~ Visual block mode
• < / > ~ Dedent/Indent selected text
• I in visual block ~ Insert text at the beginning of each line
• $A in visual block ~ Append text at the end of each line
• o ~ Jump to the other end of the selection
• gv ~ Reselect last visual selection
• g CTRL v ~ Increment each line numerically (e.g., 0 0 0 0 ~ 1 2 3 4)

Window Management

• CTRL wx ~ Swap windows
• CTRL wv ~ Split vertically
• CTRL ws ~ Split horizontally
• CTRL wq ~ Quit window
• CTRL w= ~ Equalize window sizes

Useful Operators & Motions

• vap ~ Select around paragraph
• [{, ]{, [(, ]( ~ Move to last/next unmatched {, (
• g; ~ Jump to previous insert location
• g, ~ Jump to next insert location
• '' ~ Jump to before last jump

Command-line Mode Tricks

• CTRL r+ ~ Paste from system clipboard
• CTRL u ~ Delete all characters
• CTRL g / CTRL t ~ Next/previous match in search results
• :%norm ~ Apply a command to every line (:%norm $ciwhello)
• :g/^#/d ~ Delete all comments from a Bash file
• :g/foo/s/bar/baz/g ~ Replace "bar" with "baz" in lines containing "foo"
• g& ~ Repeat last substitution

Clipboard & Registers

• gx ~ Open link under cursor
• gf ~ Open file under cursor
• If unnamedplus is set, copying with system clipboard (CTRL c) won’t overwrite Vim’s yank buffer.

Miscellaneous

• CTRL g ~ Show filename and line count
• zz, zt, zb ~ Center cursor on screen (middle, top, bottom)
• :center ~ Center text
• ga ~ Show character info under cursor
• g? ~ ROT13 encode input
• CTRL a / CTRL x ~ Increment/decrement number under cursor
• :sort u ~ Sort lines uniquely
• :sort n ~ Sort numerically
• <C-f> ~ Edit Ex command in a full-page view
• _ instead of ^ ~ _ moves to the first character on a line but also accepts a motion