One of the principles of effective text editing is moving around very efficiently.

Following are some pointers which may help you do that.

h   move one character left
j   move one row down
k   move one row up
l   move one character right
w   move to beginning of next word
b   move to beginning of previous word
e   move to end of word
W   move to beginning of next word after a whitespace
B   move to beginning of previous word before a whitespace
E   move to end of word before a whitespace

All the above movements can be preceded by a count; e.g. 4j will move down 4 lines.

0   move to beginning of line
$   move to end of line
^   move to first non-blank char of the line
_   same as above, but can take a count to go to a different line
g_  move to last non-blank char of the line (can also take a count as above)

gg  move to first line
G   move to last line
nG  move to n'th line of file (where n is a number)

H   move to top of screen
M   move to middle of screen
L   move to bottom of screen

Ctrl-D  move half-page down
Ctrl-U  move half-page up
Ctrl-B  page up
Ctrl-F  page down
Ctrl-o  jump to last cursor position
Ctrl-i  jump to next cursor position

n   next matching search pattern
N   previous matching search pattern
*   next word under cursor
#   previous word under cursor
g*  next matching search pattern under cursor
g#  previous matching search pattern under cursor

%   jump to matching bracket { } [ ] ( )

See :help {command} (for example, :help g_) for all of the above if you want more details.

CommentsEdit

Ctrl-i jump to previous cursor position <C-i> (or <Tab>) goes to the next cursor position in the jump list, and does nothing unless you've already moved to an older position in the jump list using <C-o>. (Spiiph 12:37, October 5, 2009 (UTC))