Some commands are not working in vim

Question

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?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

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.

Comments

[Rojan]

It should work if you are in command mode.

[msw]

The commands W and fx don't work? What does happen when you try them?

[remmy]

w moves to the next word, W moves to the next WORD. A WORD is basically anything delimited by white space.