Practice, Cheat Sheet and Where to Learn More

You have the whole vocabulary now. What turns it into speed is not more reading — it is a fortnight of doing ordinary errands the Vim way instead of the way your hands already know.

This page is three things: drills, graduated so you always have a next one; a cheat sheet you can keep open in a second tab; and a short list of places to learn more, each one still alive and still worth your time.

How to practise

Practise errands, not keys. "Learn yi"" is a bad goal. "The next time an error prints a path in quotes, I will lift it out with yi" instead of dragging with my finger" is a good one, because it fires on its own the next time it happens.

Three rules make it stick.

Pick one drill per day. Not a set — one. The drill you did badly yesterday is the drill for today.

Let yourself be slow. For about a week the Vim way will be slower than the mouse. That is the whole cost, and it is paid once.

Do it in real work. Practising on a scratch file teaches your fingers the keys; practising on the actual output of the actual agent that just failed teaches them when. The second one is the skill.

Drill set 1 — your first ten minutes

Do these in a real terminal with something noisy on screen. Run git log --oneline -20 or ls -la first so there is output to move around in.

1. Turn Vim keys on for this terminal: right-click (or long-press with a finger or an Apple Pencil) and choose Vim keys, the last item in the menu.
2. Press Esc. A block appears on the cursor and a NORMAL badge appears in the corner. Nothing was sent to the program — that is the promise.
3. Move: k five times, then j back down. Then gg to the top of the scrollback and G to the bottom.
4. Move onto a line with a path or a URL in it. Press W a few times, then b a few times, and notice how much further W travels.
5. Yank a whole line with yy. It is now on your system clipboard as well — paste it into any other app to prove it.
6. Find something: /, type a few letters, Enter, then n for the next match.
7. Drop a mark with ma, go and read somewhere further up, then press backtick then a to come straight back.
8. Get back to typing: press i, or tap the NORMAL badge. The badge always works, whatever mode you are in.

You now know: how to leave the keyboard's usual meaning behind, look around, take a copy, and get back.

Drill set 2 — your first week

Now the errands that replace something you currently do with a mouse.

1. Lift a path out of an error. Esc, move onto the line, yi" for a quoted path or yiW for a bare one. Then p to send it into the line you are typing, and i to carry on.
2. Fix a typo four words back. Esc, b until you are on the word, ciw, type the correction. The cursor stays where the old word was.
3. Delete a pasted URL you did not want. Esc, move onto it, diW. Three keys.
4. Clear the whole command. Esc, dd — the whole thing in a shell; once per row in an agent's own input box.
5. Copy what the agent just told you. Esc, move into the block, yip. A reply is a run of non-blank rows, so one object takes all of it.
6. Collect three things off one screen. Esc, then "ayiw, move, "byiw, move, "cyiw — then "ap "bp "cp in whatever order you want them, and i to carry on typing.
7. Get a line out of the bottom two rows so you can actually read it: Esc, move to it, zz.
8. Interrupt a running agent: Esc Esc. The first press is the mode key; the second sends a real Esc to the program.
9. Turn on the other half. ⌘⇧V in a code editor (Ctrl⇧V on Windows and Linux). Try dd, then u to undo it, then CtrlR to redo.

You now know: the dozen sequences that cover almost everything anyone actually does in terminal output.

Drill set 3 — when you want to be fast

These are the ones that separate "I use Vim keys" from "I am quick".

1. Count the keystrokes. Take a long path on screen and reach its end twice: once with w, once with W. Do it until W is the reflex for anything with slashes or dots in it.
2. Character search. f and a character to land on it, ; to go again, , to come back. Then combine: yf. yanks through the next full stop, and dt/ deletes up to the next slash — in a terminal that one only reaches the line you are typing.
3. Repeat instead of retyping. daw then . then . removes three words. 3x then . removes three more characters.
4. Jump the brackets. Land on a bracket and press %. In a code editor this is how you check a call's arguments without scrolling.
5. Aim with the screen keys. H M L to the top, middle and bottom of what is visible; 3H for three lines in from the top; CtrlU and CtrlD for half a page.
6. Search for what is already under the cursor. * then n. You never type the word.
7. Case as an operator. gUiw shouts a word, guiw quiets it, g~e flips to the end of it.
8. In a code editor, use the command line. :%s/old/new/g to substitute through the file, :42 to jump to a line, :noh to clear a highlight left over from a search.
9. Record a macro (code editors only): q then a letter to start, do the edit once, q to stop, then @ and that letter to replay it.
10. On a phone, spend a session in normal mode only: use the key row's / 0 $ ^ ? * page for aiming and the delimiter pages for yi" and ci' and da(.

You now know: enough that the slow way starts to feel like the long way round.

Cheat sheet

Where is the column to read first, because it is the thing people get wrong.

• Both — works in code editors and in terminals. Most of the sheet.
• Editors — code editors only. A terminal genuinely does not have this, and the last table on this page says why.
• Terminals — either the key exists only in a terminal, or the behaviour described is the terminal's. Never "broken in editors".

The Vim Mode reference is where both halves are written down in full.

Modes

Motions

Moving the view

Operators and single-key edits

The grammar is (count) (operator) (motion or object). dw, d$, 3dw and ciw all read the same way.

Text objects

i means inner, a means around. Then what kind.

Search

Yank, paste and registers

This is the block to learn first if you only learn one. Everything here is get that thing off the screen and put it somewhere useful.

Marks and links

Two small things that feel like a luxury until the first time you use them: keeping your place while you go and read further up, and opening a link without aiming at it.

Counts

Code editors only

What terminals don't do

One rule covers most of this: read anywhere, change only the line you're typing. Lesson 6 has the detail; this is the glance version.

Navigation, selection, search and copying never pause for any of this. They work over the whole screen, all the time.

Where to learn more

These are the resources that have been around long enough to trust, and each suits a different kind of learner.

• vimtutor — the official half-hour tutorial, and still the best first hour anyone spends on Vim. It ships with Vim itself, so if you have Vim you already have it: type vimtutor in any terminal, including a Circuitry one. It teaches you by making you edit its own text, which is why it sticks.
• :help — inside real Vim, the built-in manual. Unfashionably thorough and cross-referenced to a fault. :help motion.txt and :help text-objects are the two chapters worth reading straight through. Best once you already know what you are looking for.
• openvim.com — an interactive tutorial that runs in a browser tab, with nothing to install. The gentlest possible start if you would rather not commit to a terminal yet.
• vim-adventures.com — Vim as a puzzle game: you move a character around a map with h j k l, and the later levels only open to people who have learned the motions. The first levels are free, the rest is paid. Suits anyone who learns better when it is a game than when it is a lesson.
• vimhelp.org — the whole Vim manual, rendered for the web and searchable. Use it when you want to look something up on a phone, or link a colleague to a specific paragraph.
• Drew Neil — Practical Vim (Pragmatic Bookshelf) — the book that makes people fast. It is a hundred and some short "tips", each one an errand and the two or three keys that do it, and it is unusually good on the dot command and the repeat-and-reverse habit. Read it after you are comfortable, not before.
• Learn Vim (the Smart Way) — a free, complete online book, well organised and modern. A good middle step between vimtutor and Practical Vim, and it is easy to read a chapter at a time.

Two notes. Everything those resources teach about motions, operators, text objects, counts and registers applies here exactly — that is the whole point of using Vim's grammar rather than inventing one. What will not apply in Circuitry's terminals is the file-and-buffer half of Vim: windows, splits, :w, :q, undo. Skip those chapters until you are in real Vim.

Try it

A ten-minute setup that leaves you in a position to practise every day.

1. Open a terminal and turn Vim keys on from its own menu (right-click, or long-press).
2. Set it as the default for new terminals in Settings → Terminal → Vim keys, so you do not have to decide again.
3. Turn on the other half with ⌘⇧V from inside a code editor, and check the status bar appears at the bottom.
4. Run vimtutor in that terminal and do Lesson 1. It takes about five minutes.
5. Keep the Vim Mode reference open in a second tab for a week.
6. Choose one drill from Drill set 2 above and use it, badly, three times today.

You now know: where to practise, what to practise next, and where to go when you want more than this course covers.

Well done for getting this far. The curve is real but short: ten minutes to be useful, an afternoon to be fast, a fortnight before you stop noticing you are doing it. And you never have to turn it on everywhere at once — one terminal is a perfectly good place to live for a while.

Related

• Vim Mode — the full reference, both halves
• Terminals
• CLI Coding Agents
• Code Editor
• The Phone Key Row

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