Don't forget time-travel undo. If you get into a weird state with the undo tree, and g+/g- aren't helping, you can do ":earlier 5m" to go back to where you were 5 minutes ago, and ":later 30s" to step forward.
Unfortunately, when you're at "now" you can't do ":later 30m" to see the future.
> you can do ":earlier 5m" to go back to where you were 5 minutes ago
That's crazy! I've used vi/vim/neovim for so long, probably two decades, and I've never heard anything about this feature, yet so many cases this would have been helpful.
Must be hundreds of these features I still don't know about. What's the wildest less-known vim features people sit on and haven't shared with the rest of us yet? :)
I use this a lot when trying different ways of solving things or debugging.
Just today I was looking into a bug when I started worrying that it might be caused by a fairly recent improvement I made to the feature. I went to the file in question, went back two weeks with ":earlier 14d" then recompiled and confirmed the bug was already present without my change.
If you are using vim in the terminal pressing alt send an escape sequence when followed by another key press. So to go out of insert mode I usually press alt+ one of h/j/k/l
I was gonna make a quip that someone should really get on the ":later" feature, but then I realized that the modern LLM craze more or less is that feature.
embedding-shape|12 days ago
That's crazy! I've used vi/vim/neovim for so long, probably two decades, and I've never heard anything about this feature, yet so many cases this would have been helpful.
Must be hundreds of these features I still don't know about. What's the wildest less-known vim features people sit on and haven't shared with the rest of us yet? :)
Agentlien|12 days ago
Just today I was looking into a bug when I started worrying that it might be caused by a fairly recent improvement I made to the feature. I went to the file in question, went back two weeks with ":earlier 14d" then recompiled and confirmed the bug was already present without my change.
RMPR|12 days ago
Etheryte|12 days ago