This is just a fun little post about Vim and the commands starting with g. This was inspired by the video Vim Tips You Probably Never Heard of.
One of the great things about Vim is that I am always learning something new (or remembering something I’d forgotten). It’s a great editor that is both intellectually stimulating and fun.
Here’s a little cheat sheet for the commands starting with g:
gj- like “j”, but when ‘wrap’ on go N screen lines down
gk- like “k”, but when ‘wrap’ on go N screen lines up
g0- when ‘wrap’ off go to leftmost character of the current line that is on the screen; when ‘wrap’ on go to the leftmost character of the current screen line
g$- when ‘wrap’ off go to rightmost character of the current line that is on the screen; when ‘wrap’ on go to the rightmost character of the current screen line
gq- switch to “Ex” mode with Vim editing
gu- make Nmove text lowercase
gU- make Nmove text uppercase
g~- swap case for Nmove text
gf- start editing the file whose name is under the cursor
^to return to previous file
gv- reselect the previous Visual area (the last highlighted text)
gJ- join lines without inserting space
gx- execute application for file name under the cursor
- can use it to open links in a browser
g&- repeat last “:s” on all lines
- runs changes made to a single line globally across the entire document (use case: test substitution on a single line and then if successful do it across the whole document)
g;- go to N older position in change list
- go to last edit
g8- print hex value of bytes used in UTF-8 character under the cursor
ga- print ascii value of character under the cursor
g?- Rot13 encoding operator
g??Rot13 encode current line
gE- go backwards to the end of the previous WORD
gI- like “I” but always start in column 1
gm- go to character at middle of the screenline
gM- go to character at middle of the text line
Find all the things in the Vim docs:
:help g
Of course, there’s loads more, check it out for yourself.