Neovim

To access my Neovim config click here.

Execute normal mode commands using text:

We can execute commands using normal or norm for short:

:norm[al][!] {commands}

If the ! is given, mappings will not be used. Without it, when this command is called from a non-remappable mapping (|:noremap|), the argument can be mapped anyway.

:normal ! yyp
:norm ! itest

Once Vim enters insert mode with the i in itest<esc> all bets are off and printable characters lose their special functions. To get an <Esc> within your :normal, you need to either use <C-V><Esc> (literally type Ctrl+V followed by the Escape key) or alternatively use :execute plus backslash escaping:

:exe "norm itest\<esc>"
:exe "norm i\<cr>another\<cr>example\<esc>yipP"

Macros

Fun trick: we can add the macro call to the end of your recording macro to create a self calling recursive macro, that will just run until the end of the file, no need to guess how many times to run the macro!

Another common pattern is :g/pattern/norm! @q to execute once on each line that has pattern in it.

Go back in time (:earlier)

:earlier 1m

Insert commands with r(ead)

In command mode you can do :r ! terminal_command. r is the short version of the command read. For example, if you do r: ! ls It will append the ls content in the current cursor position or selection.

Motions

f(ind) - find forward F(ind) - find backwards Example: f, - f(ind) comma

t(il) - Til forward T(il) - Til backwards Example: yt, - yank t(il) comma

* - forward search of word under the cursor # - backwards search of word under the cursor

gv - starts visual mode with the previous visual selection. This is useful if you mess up some command, you just u to undo and gv to reselect and try again, or if you want to perform multiple operations on the same visual block

Regex pattern to register

You can do this with a substitute command.

:%s/regex/\=setreg('A', submatch(0))/n

This will append register a to whatever the regex matched. The n flag will run the command in a sandbox so nothing will actually get replaced but the side effects of the statement will happen.

You probably want to empty the register first with

:let @a=''

If you want to place a new line in-between each match:

:let @a='' | %s/regex/\=setreg('A', submatch(0) . "\n")/n 

Delete all lines containing a pattern

The command g is very useful for acting on lines that match a pattern. You can use it with the d command, to delete all lines that contain a particular pattern, or all lines that do not contain a pattern.

For example, to delete all lines containing "profile" (remove the /d to show the lines that the command will delete):

:g/profile/d

More complex patterns can be used, such as deleting all lines that are empty or that contain only whitespace:

:g/^\s*$/d

To delete all lines that do not contain a pattern, use g!, like this command to delete all lines that are not comment lines in a Vim script:

:g!/^\s*"/d

Note that g! is equivalent to v, so you could also do the above with:

:v/^\s*"/d

The next example shows use of \| ("or") to delete all lines except those that contain "error" or "warn" or "fail" (:help pattern):

:v/error\|warn\|fail/d

g can also be combined with a range to restrict it to certain lines only. For example to delete all lines containing "profile" from the current line to the end of the file:

:.,$g/profile/d

Reference here.