How to move in Vim — h j k l and w b e

The keys your fingers live on: character and word movement that every other Vim skill builds on.

Almost every entry was run headless in Vim 9.1 and the resulting file checked; the few entries a tiny build cannot run (system clipboard, persistent undo, the sudo save) were verified against Vim's own documentation instead.

h j k l     " left / down / up / right
w           " next word start      b  previous word start
e           " next word end
W B E       " same, but WORD = anything between spaces (punctuation counts as part of the word)

Vim Cheatsheet one-page card — commands that actually work — The full one-page card — Vim Cheatsheet. Get the complete cheatsheet on GitHub