Vim motion commands in the Vim command-line

vim

Sometimes in Vim, I'm typing a command and realise that I could really use Vim's motion commands for navigating the command-line:

:s/somthing/else/
realise that I misspelled something.
Fmae and be done with it.

Of course, trying this would just put Fmae at the end of the command. Is there any way to get (a subset of) the vim commands into the vim command-line? After all, that's what it does.

Best Answer

When i need to edit a long command in command line, i use q+:

then i see a list of my last commands and i can move with regular vim motions and it's easy to edit.

Related Solutions

Replace whole line in vim

Jump to the line that starts with the bangs with something like:
```
/!!<CR>
```
Enter insert mode with:
```
S
```
or
```
cc
```

See :help S.

Delete last word (Ctrl-W): Make bash shell behave like vim command line

This has nothing to do with Vim, all editors behave that way (including emacs), they treat non-word characters as delimiters. Anyway, the behavior you are talking about is controlled by readline and its manual lists quite a few commands you can assign shortcuts to. I am pasting a few relevant ones here but I recommend you read man readline for more info:

   backward-word (M-b)
          Move  back  to  the  start  of the current or previous word.  Words 
          are composed of alphanumeric characters (letters and digits).

   kill-line (C-k)
          Kill the text from point to the end of the line.
   kill-word (M-d)
          Kill from point the end of  the  current  word,  or  if  between
          words,  to  the  end  of the next word.  Word boundaries are the
          same as those used by forward-word.
   backward-kill-word (M-Rubout)
          Kill the word behind point.  Word boundaries  are  the  same  as
          those used by backward-word.
   unix-word-rubout (C-w)
          Kill  the  word behind point, using white space as a word bound‐
          ary.  The killed text is saved on the kill-ring.
   unix-filename-rubout
          Kill the word behind point, using  white  space  and  the  slash
          character  as  the word boundaries.  The killed text is saved on
          the kill-ring.

So, the one you want is backward-kill-word, which uses non alphanumeric characters as word boundaries. By default, it is assigned to Alt+Backspace but you can change that by using either the global /etc/inputrc if you want them to apply to all users or (better) your own local $HOME/.inputrc.

As far as I can tell, Ctrl+W seems to be reserved and you can't use that one but you can choose another shortcut, Ctrl+J for example. Create a $HOME/.inputrc file if it doesn't exist and add this line to it:

Control-J: backward-kill-word

That should be enough for most modern terminal emulators. However, some older terminals use different codes. If you're using xterm, for example, the line above should be written as:

C-J: backward-kill-word

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Replace whole line in vim

Delete last word (Ctrl-W): Make bash shell behave like vim command line

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