Disclaimer: This post includes just the bare minimum commands which you need to get started using vim or neovim. This article is for the absolute beginners who has zero knowledge of the vim commands and who wanted to try or want to learn just bare minimum in order to use vim or neovim.

If you get fascinated by the thought of being able to code as fast as you can and without leaving the keyboard for scrolling, going to a specific line of code or inside a parenthesis then VIM can be the goto solution for your need and desire.

Every once in a while we came across a movie or a tutorial on youtube in which the coder writes the code flawlessly at a lightning speed and that too without taking his hands off the keyboard and makes us flabbergasted.

You can be the person you see in that video and in order to do so you have to change the editor you code in which can be vscode, sublime text or any other code editor and switch to VIM or Neovim.

So, In this blog post I'll walk you through some of the key-bindings of the VIM in order to help you get started with the VIM and some of it's amazing features.

You can also use Neovim as it's basically a fork of VIM with added features and functionality. All that you can do in VIM can be done in Neovim as well but not the other way around.

So, Let's get started....

i    -->    //gets into the insert mode
v    -->    //gets into the visual mode
esc(key) --> //gets back to the normal mode
:wq  -->    //save the current changes and quit
:q!  -->    //don't save the current changes and quit
h    -->    //move left
j    -->    //move down
k    -->    //move up
l    -->    //move right
d    -->    //delete
u    -->    //undo the changes made
yy   -->    //copy the current line
p    -->    //paste
o    -->    //insert a line below
O(capital) --> //insert a line above
b    -->    //move backward (word by word)
r    -->    //replace the current alphabet
c    -->    //change the current alphabet
w    -->    //move forward (word by word)
cw   -->    //change the current word
rw   -->    //replace the current word
dw   -->    //delete the word
gg   -->    //Go to first line
<line number>gg --> // Go to the specified line number
G    -->    //Go to the last line
dd   -->    //delete the current line

These are the just the basic commands in vim which are good enough to get started using it. There are lot more commands which also include combination of the above commands. But I don't want to make you overwhelmed and confused while using it.

I would highly recommend you to practice using the above commands and in order to get started with the vim or neovim and get used to it and make yourself comfortable with it.

I will also post another article on the vim shortcuts with more advance commands in order to get you to the intermediate level. You can follow me on Twitter to get notified whenever I post it 😊.

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