Simple Vim commands you wish you'd known earlier [closed]

I really wish I'd known that you can use Ctrl+C instead of Esc to switch out of insert mode. That's been a real productivity boost for me.

The most recent "wow" trick that I learnt is a method of doing complicated search-and-replace. Quite often in the past, I've had a really complicated regexp to do substitutions on and it's not worked. There is a better way:

:set incsearch             " I have this in .vimrc
/my complicated regexp     " Highlighted as you enter characters
:%s//replace with this/    " You don't have to type it again

The "trick" here (for want of a better word) is the way that you can use the search to create the regexp (and 'incsearch' highlights it as you enter characters) and then use an empty pattern in the substitution: the empty pattern defaults to the last search pattern.

Example:

/blue\(\d\+\)
:%s//red\1/

Equivalent to:

:%s/blue\(\d\+\)/red\1/

See:

:help 'incsearch'
:help :substitute