Operators

Vim Text Editor Quick Reference

2 min read

Published Jul 6 2025

LinuxText Editor

Vim has a number of operators that can be combined with motions to do different actions.

To use them you press:

Operator - selects what action is to happen.
Motion - tell how far or what to act on.

You can also enter operator operator to apply the operator to the whole line without using a motion. eg. d d will delete a whole line or y y will yank a whole line.

List of operators available

Key	Description
d	Delete
y	Yank (copy)
c	Change and put in to insert mode
>	Indent right
<	Indent left
g~	Toggle case
gu	Make lowercase
gU	Make upper case
!	Filter through external command
=	Auto-indent, auto format code
p	Paste

Character & word motions

Key	Description
h	Left character
l	Right character
w	Start of next word
W	Start of next word in white space
b	Start of previous word
B	Start of previous word in white space
e	End of current word
E	End of current word in white space

Line & paragraph motions

Key	Description
0	Start of the line
^	First non-whitespace on the line
$	End of the line
gg	Top of the file
G	Bottom of the file
{	Previous paragraph
}	Next paragrap

Search & match motions

Key	Description
/pattern	Search forward
?pattern	Search backwards
n	Next search match
N	Previous search match
%	Jump to matching [ { ( ) } ] bracket

Find & to motions

Key	Description
fcharacter	Find next occurrence of character
Fcharacter	Find previous occurrence of character
tcharacter	Move to the next occurrence of the character
Tcharacter	Move to the previous occurrence of the character