Vim has been my text editor of choice for a couple of years. Vim (a contraction of vi improved) is a CLI text editor based on vi. It does have a learning curve as it's keyboard driven rather than menus or icons. I've been using for the entirety of this website, for posts (including this one), for editing configs, and also for to do lists. Although running vimtutor has been helpful in learning Vim, here are some basics for navigation and other functionality.
Navigation
Command
Description
j
move down
k
move up
h
move left
l
move right
L
move to bottom of screen
H
move to top of screen
$
move to end of the line
0
move to beginning of the line
i
insert text
I
insert text at the beginning of the line
gg
move to very top of document
G
move to very bottom of document
shift+left/right arrow
next word/previous word
Saving & Exiting
Command
Description
:w
write/save file
:q
quit
:q!
force quit without saving
:wq
write/save and quit
Copy/Paste/Delete
Command
Description
yy
yank/copy
dd
cut line
p
paste text after cursor
P
paste text before cursor
x
delete
X
backspace
u
undo
:redo
redo
Other Useful Commands
Command
Description
gq
reformat line to paragraph
:set spell spelllang=en_us
enables English spellcheck
:%s/value1/value2/g
Find and replace 'value1' with 'value2'
:set linebreak
Creates linebreaks after word rather than character. Useful for writing.
:colorscheme [space] [tab]
Cycle through the different preinstalled vim color themes.
