VimTrick: Using Jumps

Here's a super useful Vim trick that requires no plugins and which will certainly power-up your Vim proficiency.

In Vim, 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.

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

Over on VimTricks, we have a screencast and more details. Read the full tutorial.