Instant Savings In Vim

I save text files hundreds of times every day. I hope to have a long career developing software, so anything I do hundreds of times a day needs to be as efficient as possible.

To speed up this oft-used task I added this little bit to my .vimrc today.

" Save all the things.
nmap <Leader>s :w<CR>
imap <Leader>s <ESC>:w<CR>

So what do these mappings do? Whether I’m in insert mode or normal mode, the key sequence ,s saves the file.

First thing to note, is that I have my leader key set to comma. So when looking at my .vimrc file, <Leader> can always be interpreted as a comma.

nmap defines a mapping in normal mode. <Leader>s is the left hand side of this mapping. It’s what triggers the mapping. :w<CR> is the right hand side of the mapping. This is what is executed when the mapping is triggered.

So when I type ,s vim executes :w<CR>, saving the file.

imap defines a mapping in insert mode. When in insert mode, we need to escape to normal mode before writing the file. Hence, the prepending <ESC> on the right hand side of the mapping.

To see more that you can do with mapping keys, Vim’s :help map is a great place to start reading.


Published: 2013-05-23

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