~ / motions / wordslesson 2/6

Words and WORDS: w b e ge, W B E gE

Hop a word at a time, or a whole whitespace-separated chunk at a time.

?how it works

w jumps forward to the start of the next word, b jumps back to the start of a word, and e jumps to the end of a word. ge is e in reverse: back to the end of the previous word.

To Vim, a word is a run of letters, digits and underscores, or a run of other symbols. So user.name is three words (user, . and name), and x = 1; is four. That precision is great inside code, but slow over punctuation-heavy text.

The capital keys work on WORDS instead: anything between spaces. W, B, E and gE treat ~/.config/nvim, --dry-run or a+b*c as one chunk.

Lowercase for moving inside code, uppercase for skipping over paths, URLs and flags.

They all take counts: 3w hops three words.

⌨keys

`w`	start of the next word
`b`	back to the start of a word
`e`	end of the word
`ge`	back to the end of the previous word
`W`	start of the next WORD (whitespace-separated)
`B`	back to the start of a WORD
`E`	end of the WORD
`gE`	back to the end of the previous WORD

4 drills

Hop forward with w: Jump forward to the start of the highlighted word with a counted w.
Back up with b: Jump back to the start of the highlighted word with b (and a count).
Word ends: e and ge: Put the cursor on the last letter of the highlighted word. It may be ahead of you (e) or behind you (ge).
Skip punctuation with WORDS: This text is full of punctuation. Reach the target with the capital WORD motions: W, B, E or gE.

The drill editor loads in your browser.