Vim and TMux Commands Galore

Avishek Sen Gupta on 5 January 2023

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This short post lists the Neovim (Vim) shortcuts I am getting used to. I’ve recently switched to trying the Vim mode for my IDE needs, and having used Vim previously only for very simple tasks, am having a blast practising the basic Vim shortcuts. Ultimately, I will probably move to doing more IDE-related work in native Vim too.

I’ve also added TMux shortcuts because I’m learning to use that too.

Vim commands

• u/<C-r>: Undo/Redo
• .: Repeat last command
• w/b: Move forward/backward by a word
• s refers to a sentence. Thus diw and daw deletes a sentence from anywhere inside it, and everything around the sentence, respectively.
• (/): Jump to previous/next sentence
• i/a/I/A: Start editing before/after cursor, before start/after end of line
  • i: Considers whitespace as words too, so i2w selects a word and any whitespace after it.
  • a: Considers word + whitespace as a text object, so a2w selects "text1 text2 ".
• 0/_/$: Go to starting character / starting non-whitespace character / end of line
• d: Delete (suffix with counter and text object, like d2w, dd)
• c: Change (suffix with counter and text object, like c2w, cc)
• r: Replace (suffix with counter and text object, like r2w, rr)
• y: Yank (suffix with counter and text object, like y2w, yy)
  • Interesting Use Case: ny$ yanks from cursor to end of line n times, so n lines, starting from the current cursor position.
• F-x/f-x: Find character x before/after
• *: Search forward word under cursor
• / and ?: Find string forward/backward
• P/p: Paste before/after cursor
• x: Delete character under cursor
• nG/ngg: Go to line number n
• G: Go to end of file
• i: “Everything inside” qualifier used in conjunction with other verbs, like diw, ci"
• <C-v>: Visual Block Mode, use I to insert en-masse
• <C-o>/<C-i>: Go to old/new positions
• <C-u>/<C-d>: Move up/down half a page
• {/}: Jump forward/back across a contiguous block of text
• +/-: Jump to start of next/previous line

Ex commands

• x,y<Command>z: Defines an inclusive range of lines from x to y and performs <Command> with optional argument z.
  • m/t: Move/Copy range of lines to after z. Example: 10,20m30. Single line variants like10m30 also work.
• x;+/-n: Defines range of +/-n starting from line x
• ., .+/-n: Refers to the current line / Refers to n lines after/before current line.
• $, $+/-n: Refers to the last line of the document (Compare to going to last character in line in Vim’s Normal mode). +/-n navigates n lines after/before last line.
• %: Refers to all lines (same as 1,$)
• /pattern/ and ?pattern?: Searches forward and backward for pattern. This can be used as a location argument in other commands.
• :<C-p>/:<C-n>: Moves backwards/forwards through command history.

TMux commands

• <C-b>?: View all keybindings
• <C-b>%: Horizontal split
• <C-b>": Vertical split
• <C-b><Arrow Keys>: Moves across TMux panes
• <C-b>d: Detaches from current TMux session
• <C-b>[: Enables scroll mode
• <C-b><Space>: Enables highlight mode after entering scroll mode. Press <C-b> to yank highlighted text.
• <C-b>]: Pastes copied content to another TMux terminal
• tmux ls: Lists running TMux sessions
• tmux attach -t <SessionID>: Attaches to specified TMux session
• tmux rename-session -t <OldSessionID> <NewSessionID>: Renames a TMux session
• <C-b>,: Renames current window
• tmux new -s <SessionID>: Creates a new TMux session with given SessionID

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