http://smilent.github.io This blog lists some vim commands that are used frequently. However, some quite basic commands such as hjkl are not included. These commands work on Mac OS X. In the end of this post I put some sites about learning vim.

Type :help cmd in Vim to get more details of the command cmd.

Text Edit

Copy, Paste and Select

p       " paste from buffer
:r !pbpaste " paste from clipboard. Note: it works on OS X, not sure whether it works on other systems.

yw      " copy from the current position to the next word.
nyw     " copy n words from current position, including the following white spaces. n can be any positive integer.
ye      " copy from the current position to the end of the  word.
nye     " copy n words from current position, NOT including the following white spaces. n can be any positive integer.
yiw     " copy the whole word under cursor. It does not require the cursor at the beginning of the word.

yy      " copy current line
y^      " copy from the current  position to the beginning of the line
y$      " copy from the current position to the end of the line.
y{      " copy from the current position to the beginning of the paragraph.
y}      " copy from the current position to the end of the paragraph.

:m,n y  " copy m-th line to n-th line
:'a,'b y    " copy from mark a to mark b

:m,n !pbcopy    " copy m-th line to n-th line to clipboard. The copied lines are deleted from the source text
:m,nw !pbcopy   " copy m-th line to n-th line to clipboard. The copied lines are kept in the source text

Replace ‘y’ with the following characters to change behaviors.

character behavior
d delete
c change

Replace and Substitute

r       " replace the current character
R       " turn to replace mode

s       " substitute the current character and turn into insert mode
S       " substitute current line

Advanced usages can be found in Search and Substitute.

Undo and Redo

u       " undo last change
U       " return the last line which was modified to its original state

Ctrl-r  " redo

Change is defined as all the input between two vim commands. U is not actually a true “undo” command as it does not actually navigate undo history like u and CTRL-r. This means that (somewhat confusingly) U is itself undo-able with u; it creates a new change to reverse previous changes.

Indent Code Block

=       " indent the current line
=%      " indent the current braces {...}

G=gg    " auto indent entire document, which is equal to gg=G
n==     " indent n lines from the current line
=nj     " indent the current line and the following n lines
=nk     " indent the current line and the previous n lines

= can also be combined with many jump commands listed below.

Locate and Jump

w       " go to the beginning of the next word
e       " go to the end of the current word

nG      " go to n-th line
gg      " go to the beginning of the file
G       " go to the end of the file

L       " go to the bottom of the screen
H       " go to the top of the screen

ma      " set mark 'a'. You can change 'a' to any other characters
'a      " go to mark 'a'

'.      " go to the beginning of the line where the last modification occurs
`.      " go to the exact position where the last modification occurs

%       " match brackets ()[]{}
*       " go to the next same word
#       " go to the previous same word
^       " go to the beginning of the current line, not including leading whitespaces
0       " go to the beginning of the current line
$       " go to the end of the current line
(       " go to the beginning of the current sentence
)       " go to the end of the current sentence
{       " go to the beginning of the current paragraph
}       " go to the end of the current paragraph

Search and Substitute

/foo        " search forward for 'foo'
/\<foo\>    " search forward for 'foo', but only match the whole word
/foo\c      " search case-insensitively
?foo        " search backward for 'foo'
/^foo.*others   " line beginning with 'foo' and followed by 'others'. Regex expressions work here.

:%s/foo/ /gn    " count occurrences of 'foo'

:%s/foo/others /igc " substitute 'foo' with others, case-insensitively(i), globally(g) and asking for confirmation(c) 
:s/foo/others /igc  " substitute 'foo' with others in the current line

Global Operation

For details, refer to this page.

Brief explanation of :g:

:[range]g/pattern/cmd

This acts on the specified [range] (default whole file), by executing the Ex command cmd for each line matching pattern (an Ex command is one tarting with a colon such as :d for delete). Before executing cmd, “.” is set to the current line.

:g/one\|two/        " list lines containing 'one' or 'two'
:g/foo/d            " delete all lines containing 'foo'
:v/foo/d            " delete all lines not containing 'foo', the same as :g!/foo/d. 'v' means inverse

File Operations

:x      " save and quit, the same as :wq
:qa     " quit all files
:saveas newfile    " save to 'newfile'

Window

:e filename     " edit another file
:split filename " open file in a new horizontal window
:vsplit filename    " open file in a new vertical window

Ctrl-w h        " move to the file on the left. 'h' can be replaced by 'j', 'k' and 'l'
Ctrl-w =        " make all windows equal size
Ctrl-w +        " increase height
Ctrl-w -        " decrease height
Ctrl-w _        " maximize height
Ctrl-w >        " increase width
Ctrl-w <        " decrease width
Ctrl-w |        " maximize width
:res +n         " increase height by n lines
:vertical res +n    " increase width by n characters

:hide           " close current window
:only       " keep only this window open

Configuration

:set nu     " show line numbers
:set relativenumber " set relative number
:set hlsearch   " highlight search
:set autoindent " auto indent
:set smartindent    " smart indent
:set tabstop=4  " set tabstop = 4 
:set softtabstop=4
:set shiftwidth=4   " set indent width = 4
:set expandtab  " replace tab with whitespaces when indent
:filetype on    " auto detect file type
:syntax on      
:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us " auto spell check

Some helpful sites: