Learning to speak Vim

Neovim is easier to learn and gain much more benefit from if you learn to speak commands as sentences.

First learn some verbs:

• c change
• d delete
• g go,
• v visual select
• y yank (copy)

Then use those verbs with some modifiers

• ' mark
• { } beginning/end of paragraph
• 0 start of line
• ^ first non white-space character of line
• $ end of line
• a around
• f find (includes character)
• i inside a range (e.g. word, paren,)
• s surround
• t till (move just before specified character)

Then learn the text objects you can apply verbs and modifiers too

• b block/parentheses
• p paragraph,
• s sentence
• t tag e.g. html/xml
• w word

Examples of speaking Vim

Practice speaking evil with these examples

Keybinding	Description
c i s	change inside current sentence (change the whole sentence)
c i "	change inside double quotes
c f )	change from cursor to next ) character
c s ' "	change by the surrounding single quotes with double quotes
c t X	change till the character X (not including X)
c /foo	change until the first search result of ‘foo’
d d	delete current line
D	delete current line from cursor onward
d i w	delete inside the current word (delete word)
v t SPC	visual select till the next Space character
v s ]	visually select and surround with [] without spaces
v s [	as above with [ ] with spaces between parens and content
g v	go to last visual selection (select last visual selection)
v a p	visually select around current paragraph
v i w S "	visually select, insert around current word, and surround with quotes
y y	yank (copy) current line
y w	yank (copy) current word
y @ a	yank (copy) to mark a (m a creates a mark called a)