Vim Tricks: For when you don’t have a mouse

Why do people use vim?

This banana slug must have a question.

Hackernoon has a more complete answer, but there are many benefits aside from not having to shell out for a new Apple mouse after you accidentally left it at the bottom of your backpack and squashed it in the TSA line. As someone who lives “in the cloud” during a lot of the workweek, vi/vim are installable on basically every machine- unlike modern GUI-based IDEs. In case you’re daunted by the learning curve, fret not, because there are games and tutorials to help with the basics.

Here are a few life pro tips I’ve come across

Add something to the end/beginning of each line

Have you ever needed to create a comma-delimited list from a text input like this?

# input
squid
octopus
whale
cuttlefish

# output
'squid',
'octopus',
'whale',
'cuttlefish',

Add a quote to the beginning of the line and a quote + comma to the end of the line.

End: :%norm A', & Beginning: :%norm I'

Explanation:

 %       # for every line
 norm    # type the following commands
 A*      # append '*' to the end of current line
 I*      # append '*' to the beginning of current line

Find and replace

You’ve renamed a class and now need to change all occurrences of it in your file (oh no). Rather than using your IDE like a normal person (or perhaps you don’t have one) try the following (from the vim docs)

:s/foo/bar/g # Find each occurrence of 'foo' (in the current line only), and replace it with 'bar'.
:%s/foo/bar/g # Find each occurrence of 'foo' (in all lines), and replace it with 'bar'.

Whatever you do, leave with :wq.¹

1. unless you want to discard your changes, then it’s :q! ↩