Some VIm tips for navigation

VIm is my primary editor,.. actually, scratch that, my only editor. I spend most of my awake time in terminals writing code and over the years I’ve found VIm to be one pretty powerful tool.

Splits

One thing that I’ve always found especially useful for development is the ability to split the screen to view / edit multiple files at once.

To split the window vertically, simply use the command

:vsplit or :vs

and to split the window horizontally, use the command

:split or :sp

You can yank and paste text between the spits and navigate around using +ww.

Tabs

Another thing I use when writing code is VImTabs.

The four commands you need to remember are:

To create a new tab

:tabnew

To close a tab

:tabc

To navigate to the next tab (right)

:tabn

To navigate to the previous tab (left)

:tabc

Tab mappings

But having to type those command each time you want to navigate becomes a pain so here’s a mapping that I use to speed things up.

"Mappings for tab controls
map <C-up> :tabnew<CR>
map <C-down> :tabc<CR>
map <C-left> :tabp<CR>
map <C-right> :tabn<CR>

These map ctrl+up to open a new tab, ctrl+down to close the current tab, ctrl+left to navigate left, and ctrl+right to navigate right.

Just stick these in your vimrc file and reload VIm.