Will Anderson

If you’re a Vim user like me, you’ve likely found yourself staring at a view like this and wondered:

“How’d I get here, and how do I get away”

Don’t dispair. You’ve discovered Vim’s command line history. This is the list of commands you’ve run. They’re stored in ~/.viminfo or ~/_viminfo, depending on your system configuration

There are actually two modes you can get into: Command Line History, and Search History. We’ll cover both

If you didn’t want to get into your command/search history, you can easily get back to normal mode by hitting CTRL+C twice

Command Line History

Command line history is activated by typing q:. I usually find myself in this mode after trying to type :q too quickly

This is actually a pretty useful tool. You’re basically opening a file that contains your command history, so you can treat it like you would a file you have opened in Vim.

Start by navigating through the commands.

• You can use j and k to move down and up.
• You can search through the commands with /<searchtext>

Once you find the command you want to run, simply hit ENTER from “Normal” mode to run that command on the current file

Search History

Search history is activated by typing q/.

This is also a useful tool, though not as useful as command line history, in my opinion

Just like command line history, you can navigate through the history just like a regular file, and hit ENTER with the cursor over the desired search to perform that search on the current document

Now You’re Better at Vim

When I figured out what these views meant, it took a scary “how do I get out of this mode” moment, and turned it into a “this is useful” moment. Hopefully after reading this post, you’ll feel the same way!