7

I am new to Vim. I'm following these tutorials to help me learn to use it.

But some of my commands are not working, for example:

Capital W.
f followed by a character. (To move to next same char.)

Why is this happening and how can I get these commands to work?

Zanna
  • 72,471
Mohit Jain
  • 1,179

3 Answers3

13

this may be because by default Ubuntu has a cut down version of vim called vim-tiny and many commands don't work in vim-tiny. To get full functionality you need to install vim. You can install vim with following command

sudo apt-get install vim

Try these commands after installing vim and let me know if you still have problems.

muru
  • 207,970
binW
  • 13,204
3

Usually VIM runs in VI compatibility mode by default.

Try switching modes and see if the commands work. Use this to see which mode you are in:

:set compatible?

Then 

:set compatible

or 

:set nocompatible

to switch to the other mode and give your commands a try.

Adding

set nocompatible

or 

set compatible

to a file called ".vimrc" in your home directory will make the setting the default for vim.

mikewilliamson
  • 679
1

I'm not sure of capital W. I dont know what it is supposed to do, it works just like small w, moving to the next word.

Regarding f followed by a character will move to the character only in the current line. If you want to move to a character else where use / and the character and press enter. ? for reverse. I too got confused with f first.

balki
  • 2,330
  • w moves to the next word, W moves to the next WORD. A WORD is basically anything delimited by white space. – remmy Oct 27 '13 at 01:08