VimTrick: Using Jumps

More efficient navigation while working in Vim

A trick which will certainly power-up your Vim proficiency is to make use of jumps. Jumps are cursor movements stored in a list called the jumplist. When making certain movements, such as jumping to line 42 with 42G, Vim will save it as a “jump” in the jumplist. You can list jumps using the :jumps command. To move backwards through the jump list to an older jump use ctrl-o. To move to a newer jump use ctrl-i.

This short screencast that shows how efficient you can move back and forth through a file with the jumplist:

Many shorter movements, like regular hjkl and those based on motions do not modify the jumplist. So their movements will not be navigable with ctrl-o and ctrl-i. Similarly, the colon line number (:42) movement does not modify the jump list. Examples movements which modify the jump list are:

• /pattern searches and ?pattern searches (forward and backward pattern matching)

• * and # (forward and backward search for the word under the cursor.

• % (jump to a matching enclosing character like paren, brace, bracket, etc)

• Any inter-file navigation like gf

Vim will store up to 100 locations in your jump list. Realistically, you’re unlikely to use that many. But just a few taps of ctrl-o or ctrl-i can be an extremely efficient way to move between chunks of code or open buffers.

For more info, check out :help jumplist in Vim.

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