Vital Commands

Opening Files

The most basic way to open a file in vim is to just call it as an argument:

$ vim path/to/file.txt

      #You can open more than one file like this.
      vim path/to/file1.txt path/to/file2.txt path/to/file3.txt

      #Vim even supports connecting over urls
      vim https://path/to/file1.txt ftp://path/to/file2.txt scp://path/to/file3.txt
      

Alternatively, if you open vim without arguments you can use :edit or :e to open files in write mode.

:e path/to/file4.txt

Basic Navigation

• k - up
• j - down
• l - right
• h - left
• Ctrl+f - bottom
• Ctrl+b - top
• :n - move to nth line

Basic Editing

To edit the document you need to enter insert mode. You can do this by pressing the i key. To exit insert mode you press the Esc key

Closing the File

If you're in normal mode you can exit in two ways:

:wq  #write changes to disk and quit.
      :qa!  # quit all open docs and ignore warnings.