[Another in my series of posts on Vim]
Sometimes when you’re typing natural language text, you find yourself wanting to rephrase the sentence you’ve written so far. You could hit backspace many times to delete the characters to the left of the cursor, or you could type Ctrl-W. When you’re in Insert mode, Ctrl-W will delete from the cursor to the beginning of the previous word.
If, instead, you type in Ctrl-U, you will delete everything to the left of the cursor on that line (everything before it), and preserve everything to the right of the cursor (everything after it).
Let’s try this out. Open a test file in Vim and enter Insert mode by hitting
a or i or o. Then type in the following sentence (don’t hit <ESC>):
A slow brown dog lazed
Then hit Ctrl-W twice. You’ll see that each time you hit Ctrl-W, you delete
the word to the left of the cursor. After hitting Ctrl-W twice, you should see:
A slow brown
Then continue with the rest of the sentence. Type in ‘fox jumps over a lazy dog.’ After typing that in, still in Insert mode, use the arrow keys to move your cursor just before the ‘b’ in ‘brown’:
A slow brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
^
Your cursor should be just to the left of the 'b'
The hit Ctrl-U. Everything to the left of the cursor will be deleted, leaving
you with:
brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
Then you an continue typing in ‘The quick’ , which will get you:
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
I’ve found that learning these little shortcuts really helps me type efficiently and keep my typing in sync with my thoughts.