Efficient Navigation in Vim

When editing a file, it is quite crucial that you can navigate your cursor around rather quickly. Vim and Neovim allow for many ways of doing so which, depending on the situation, can be more or less efficient and useful. This article examines the different ways of moving the cursor and compares them. Here, the term “efficiency” refers to navigating the cursor with as little time and effort (i.e., the number of keystrokes) as possible.

Using the Mouse

TL;DR: Not recommended

Using the mouse pointer to navigate Vim may seem like an obvious choice for users coming from a GUI editor like Visual Studio Code or similar. However, in Vim, the goal is to keep your fingers on the “home row” of the keyboard (the row where the F and the J keys reside) and not having to move them greatly towards the touchpad or even the mouse. This should reduce the strain on your hands and wrists and make editing more efficient. Therefore, navigating with the mouse should be highly discouraged in most situations and is even disabled by default.

It can be helpful to enable it for users transitioning from one of the aforementioned editors who would like to have a smooth transition by allowing themselves to use the mouse initially and switching it back off again later in their learning journey. To turn on mouse navigation, add the following to your configuration file (either ~/.vimrc or ~/.config/nvim/init.vim):

" Temporarily enable mouse support
set mouse=a

This will allow you to point and click to move the cursor and to scroll through the current buffer.

Using the Arrow Keys

TL;DR: Not recommended

Again, for users used to other text editors or even word-processing software like LibreOffice Writer, it may be tempting to use what they know. In these programs, you mostly use the arrow keys for keyboard-based navigation. This is not recommended because… you guessed it: They require the user to move their fingers away from the home row.

The alternative is, as described in the next section, to use the h, j, k and l keys on the keyboard which are conveniently placed at the center and where you most likely have your fingers most of the time.

Using h,j,k,l

TL;DR: Use for small navigation. Use with relative line numbers.

h, j, k and l are the basic movement keys in Vim. They should be used instead of the usual arrow keys on the keyboard to, as discussed above, keep your fingers on the home row as much as possible. It takes a little practice but will pay off eventually.

One hugely important thing to do with these keys is to not press them multiple times in sequence, or even hold them down to move several columns or rows. As with many commands in Vim, they can be prefixed with numbers to move multiple times. For example, 12j can be used rather than pressing the j key twelve times which is, obviously, much more efficient (3 vs. 12 keystrokes). However, it is recommendable to only use these keys for small movements and mostly to move lines up or down because there are more efficient ways of moving longer vertical distances or horizontal distances in general.

It can be very useful to enable relative line numbers to see at a glance what number to prefix j or k with to move to a certain line. They can be enabled by adding the following two lines to your configuration file:

" Enable relative line numbers
set relativenumber
set number

This will always show the absolute number of the line the cursor is currently on and relative numbers for all others.

Navigation Within a Line

TL;DR: Mostly use f. Also consider w,b,e,^ and $.

So far, we’ve mostly looked at navigating from one line to another. The next step is to navigate within a line. Often, the straightforward thing to do is to use w or W to move to the next word, b or B to move to the previous word or even e or E to move directly to the end of the next word. For all of them, the lowercase variant considers a “word” to be what we intuitively see as one using delimiters like -, / or . to separate one word from another. The uppercase variant considers anything a word that is delimited by whitespace. Obviously, any of these commands can be prefixed with a number to jump multiple words in one go (e.g., 7w). Other useful commands are ^ which moves to the first non-whitespace character of the line and $ to move to the last character of a line. Considering the following line

abc def-ghi-jkl mno

with the cursor currently on the g character, pressing the following commands is the most efficient way to get to a specific target character:

When moving multiple words back and forth or to a specific place within a word, t and f are incredibly helpful. Especially f moves to the next occurrence of a specific character, which lets you make big jumps within a line. The difference is that f moves to a character and t moves to right before a character. So t is mostly useful for deleting everything to a character. These commands’ uppercase variants F and T do the same thing, but backwards. All of these commands can be “repeated” with the ; command which jumps to the next occurrence of the targeted character while , jumps to the previous one.

Another command worth mentioning at this point is % which you can use when a character which is part of a pair (e.g., [ or }) is currently under your cursor. The % command will take the cursor to the corresponding “partner” of that character in the pair. So placing the cursor on a ( and then executing this command will take you to its closing ).

Changelist and Jumplist

TL;DR: Use ctrl+o and ctrl+i to jump “back” and “forward”. Use g; to jump to last edit.

The jumplist contains all the points in any buffer you recently jumped to (e.g., with 12j). It can be accessed with :jumps. The commands to jump back and forth in the jumplist are ctrl+o and ctrl+i respectively. They can be very useful because they act like the “back” and “forward” buttons in a web browser.

The changelist, on the other hand, contains all the points in the current buffer where you have recently changed something. It can be accessed with the :changes command. A very useful command here is g; which jumps to the last place where you have changed something (i.e., jumps back in the changelist). g,, on the other hand, takes you back to where you were before (i.e., jumps forward in the changelist). This allows you to easily switch back and forth between a point of reference (e.g., some documentation) and the place where you are currently editing.

Search

TL;DR: Great for moving larger distances vertically and horizontally

By far, one of the most efficient ways of moving longer distances horizontally and vertically in a buffer is to use the search. The / key lets you search for a term and conveniently jump to its location. Pressing the n and N keys jumps to the next and previous occurrence of the search term, respectively. The ? key searches backwards from the current cursor position (which inverts n and N). Even though, the main purpose of the search command is obviously to search, it is an incredibly powerful tool to navigate quickly and efficiently.

The user experience of the search command can be vastly improved by adding the following settings to your configuration file:

" Incrementally search while typing
set incsearch
" Use smart case for searching
set ignorecase
set smartcase
" Highlight searches
set hlsearch
" Use <C-L> to clear the highlighting of :set hlsearch.
if maparg('<C-L>', 'n') ==# ''
  nnoremap <silent> <C-L> :nohlsearch<C-R>=has('diff')?'<Bar>diffupdate':''<CR><CR><C-L>
endif

incsearch will make sure that the search pattern is applied incrementally while typing, instead of only after pressing the enter key. The combination of ignorecase and smartcase ignores the case of the search term when not using any uppercase letters and doesn’t ignore it when using at least one uppercase letter, which is quite convenient and surprisingly intuitive. hlsearch highlights any matches for the search term, allowing to easily jump between them using n and N. The last statement lets you clear the highlighted search results by pressing ctrl+l to unclutter your view, once done searching and jumping.

All in all, search is one of the most powerful tools for intuitive and efficient navigation. It covers the common use case of knowing the word or part of a word to navigate to, but not having your eyes directly pointed there yet. Furthermore, it’s simply the fastest way of jumping somewhere in many cases and beats other methods of navigation quite often in that regard.

Clunky Movements

TL;DR: Use for very specific use cases only. Consider gg and G for getting to know a file.

In this section, we’ll discuss what can be referred to as “clunky movements”. They let the user navigate larger distances in the buffer while sacrificing precision. These commands are less useful for exactly that reason. Vim can be a very efficient text editor by letting the user think about what they want to change, jumping precisely there with very few keystrokes, entering insert mode, performing a change with scalpel-like precision and finally exiting insert mode as soon as it’s done. The movement commands in this section, however, get the cursor around the document as a whole while it’s hard for the user to predict at a glance, which line and column exactly they will land on.

A good example are the H, M and L keys which take the cursor to the top, the middle or the bottom of the current view port respectively. While this is a large movement with just one keystroke, it’s highly likely that they won’t exactly get the cursor to the line needed but rather will have to be accompanied by pressing j or k multiple times, which will result in much more thinking and many more keystrokes than what can be achieved with other methods. Similar are the { and } keys, which take the cursor to the next paragraph (a block of text delimited by blank lines).

A useful exception to that are the gg and G commands, which take the cursor to the first or the last line of a buffer, respectively. It’s easy and effortless to predict where these movements will take you. Especially the G command can be quite useful because it allows appending to a file with just two keystrokes (G followed by o).

Plugins

TL;DR: Install only the necessary plugins. Check out fzf!

So far, we’ve only talked about features that are built into Vim or that can be configured on a vanilla installation. However, there are many useful plugins which can make navigating Vim even more efficient. It is important to carefully pick them, though, as any plugin can make Vim slower and/or less stable.

fzf

One of the most useful plugins is fzf which is a great one to have in general. It offers many helpful commands like :BLines for searching the current buffer with intelligent fuzzy matching or :Rg for even searching the whole project for specific patterns which, in contrast to the other methods we’ve looked at so far, lets the user navigate between files. fzf is a tool that can be used for jumping between files and buffers but also, between different locations within them. I highly recommend checking it out and adding the following lines to your configuration file:

" Jump to specific file
nnoremap <C-P> :Files<cr>
" Search whole project
nnoremap \ :Rg<space>

The first line lets you open files in the current project by pressing ctrl+p and then typing with fuzzy matching. The second line allows searching the entire project with fuzzy matching by pressing \ (in contrast to / which searches the current buffer).

Sneak

Another useful plugin is Sneak. Instead of pressing n multiple times after a search to jump to the correct occurrence of the search term, it highlights each occurrence and assigns them a unique character combination. By pressing this combination, you can quickly jump to that occurrence with very few keystrokes.

An added bonus is that something very similar exists as a browser extension which allows using many other Vim commands in a web browser and makes browsing using only the keyboard possible. It’s called Vimium.

Conclusion

Obviously, there are many other ways of navigating Vim buffers that aren’t covered here. These are only some of the navigation techniques that can be used, and which ones are most convenient and intuitive in which situations is often a matter of taste.

Another thing to note is that this article only talks about motion commands. It does not discuss commands that go into insert mode while moving the cursor to a specific place (e.g., the A command which moves the cursor to the end of a line and enters insert mode). While those can be incredibly useful, discussing them here would have gone beyond the scope of this article.

I highly recommend getting to know as many different techniques as possible and carefully thinking about which one makes sense in which situation. You shouldn’t be afraid of forcing yourself a bit to use different ones until you have found your own toolbox of useful ones for different situations. It takes some practice to get these into muscle memory, but it’s worth it all the while to make Vim the efficient text editor it can be.

For a full example of a configuration, check out my own dotfiles.