Some Cool Vim Shortcuts

It’s sometimes more fun to find one or two slightly useful shortcuts and spam them any chance you can as opposed to reading a cheatsheet. Also, writing it here makes it easier for me to remember to use them again. Here are a couple of nice movements that I’ve found:

• o/O: Add a new line and go into insert mode. There are no additional words needed to describe its infinite usefulness.
• =: Indent the file. Especially great after I’ve let a file of code go to chaos. Of course, this isn’t always perfect but if anything, it beats stylua, which makes my snippet code an absolute mess.
• t: Apparently tags are a thing?
• ~, C-a/C-x: Used to change the case of letters and increment/decrement numbers respectively. Sure, you can use r as well, but having these keymaps makes things slightly faster.
  • Also, ([num])C-a/C-x is life-changing.
• s: For surrounding, not delete and go into insert mode. I can’t believe I’ve used (Neo)vim for so long and haven’t been on the surround wave.
• zz: do not remap this to save. Centering your cursor is more important.
  • z. is also a good choice too, and as I try to swap to Dvorak, I find this more and more useful.
  • Wait, there’s also zt (cursor to the top) and zb (cursor to the bottom)?!
• Putting @macro while recording @macro: I accidentally forgot to stop recording my macro, and I did @macro by accident before stopping. This resulted in a self-referencing macro which did the work for me, which was very nice.
• "[reg](y|p): custom registers saved me so much time when typesetting math.
• .: how I went over a year being a Vim enjoyer and didn’t know this shortcut is still surprising.
• %: I forgot the keybind to find the matching delimiter/parentheses or whatever the right word for this is. But now I won’t.
• submatch([num]): “I’d like to use match groups in (Neo)vim but I don’t think they have it” - me, some while ago. They do, as I found out one day after looking for something else entirely. Why I did not do a simple search online earlier still baffles me to this day.
• #: keep accidentally pressing this (similar to . sometimes as well) and just found this to be annoying since it’ll highlight the word under the cursor. Except for this is incredibly helpful for finding other instances of a word under the cursor (yes, I know I have vim-illuminate) but still I end up pressing # more often and find n/N more useful to move around. Maybe that’s just a sign I should stop using this plugin.
• C-o: Why do all the best commands always have o in them? One can only wonder. Anyways, this is another one of those commands I found once and can’t stop spamming for the life of me. This is for executing a singular command as if you were in normal mode while staying in insert mode. It’s a huge lifesaver for the countless times I’ve used jkla to move around and type outside of a parentheses or code block.

Not Really Shortcuts But Also Quite Useful

• Better window movement: No, not Windows. Vim windows. I must say I had a day figuring out window navigation. Working on coding homeworks sometimes makes me wish I could view multiple files simultaneously. It gets a little tiring looking at the number of open buffers grow until I can’t quite see them anymore as well. The latter was easy to solve - just remove the buffer line and get good at keeping the right buffers in rotation (with a little help from Harpoon). Then tackling the former meant I had to deal with windows (there are also tabs, but I think windows solves my problem easily), though it was hard to adjust to moving around with them. Fortunately, it was a done deal once I figured out how to be comfortable with splits and move them around. Below are my keymaps for moving around:
  • C-[hjkl] moves around windows or calls a split (which is also slightly punishing for spamming keymaps until you find the right one)
  • C-[up|down|left|right] resizes windows. I’m not too sure how I feel about that one just yet; I might try C-S-[hjkl] as well. It’s a tough battle as this exact key combination is also a thought I’m having for creating a new window without it being a split, but writing a function that can swap between these functionalities, while interesting, feels very wrong (and can also lead to unintended behavior).

Lua code for the C-[hjkl] mapping:

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--- if using Lua 5.2 or above, unpack is deprecated, but also table.unpack doesn't seem to work correctly; my solution to this is to alias unpack
unpack = table.unpack or unpack

-- wrapper: vim.keymap.set RHS needs to be a function, but need to pass in args, so wrap() exists
local wrap = function(func, ...)
    local args = {...}
    return function()
        func(unpack(args))
    end
end

-- function: move the window in direction shown or create new split (adapted to lua from: https://pastebin.com/ya9hWSbY)
local win_move = function(key)
    local cur_win = vim.fn.winnr()
    vim.cmd.wincmd(key)
    if cur_win == vim.fn.winnr() then
        if key == "j" or key == "k" then
            vim.cmd.wincmd("s")
        else
            vim.cmd.wincmd("v")
        end
        vim.cmd.wincmd(key)
    end
end

-- set the keymaps
vim.keymap.set("n", "<C-h>", wrap(win_move, "h"), { noremap = true, silent = true })
vim.keymap.set("n", "<C-j>", wrap(win_move, "j"), { noremap = true, silent = true })
vim.keymap.set("n", "<C-k>", wrap(win_move, "k"), { noremap = true, silent = true })
vim.keymap.set("n", "<C-l>", wrap(win_move, "l"), { noremap = true, silent = true })