How to jump to the beginning or end of line in vim + OS X

Question

In terminal I can do this by pressing shift+home and shift+end, but it doesn't seem to work in vim. Home and end keys scroll terminal window only. I would like to jump in edit mode.

Answer 1

This answer assumes you are using vim in a Terminal window.

The default bindings for Home and End are a bit different from what a program would expect based on the usual TERM setting (i.e. an xterm variant). If you want to stick with the default bindings (and having to use the Shifted variants in Terminal), you might try putting something like this in your .vimrc:

:" map Mac OS X Terminal.app default Home and End
:map <ESC>[H <Home>
:map <ESC>[F <End>
:imap <ESC>[H <C-O><Home>
:imap <ESC>[F <C-O><End>
:cmap <ESC>[H <Home>
:cmap <ESC>[F <End>

Otherwise, you might try adjusting the codes that Terminal sends when you use Home and End (unshifted even, if you like). A search would probably turn up some places that describe how to do it (here is one). The basic idea is that you want to have Terminal send ESC[1~ instead of ESC[H for Home and ESC[4~ instead of ESC[F for End (or Shift-Home/Shift-End if you want to keep Home/End for accessing scrollback). I would describe the process in more detail, but I only have 10.4, and I know Terminal was changed a lot in 10.5 and later.

Answer 2

In MacVim, you can use Command 'Left Arrow' and Command 'Right Arrow' to go to the beginning and end of line while being in edit mode.