Vim in OSX: How to do page-up/page-down/go to EOL through a vim file opened in terminal?

Question

In putty, which is how I primarily used VIM, I could do the following:

• Page up/down : Using the native Page up/down key. In Mac, the alternative is Fn + Up/Down, which doesn't work in the terminal (doesn't scroll inside the vim file, but scrolls the terminal buffer)
• Similarly, the Fn + right/left keys do not take me to start/end of line

How do I emulate this functionality in Mac OS X ?

Answer 1

Terminal's default preferences map Shift-Page Up and Shift-Page Down to the character sequences that tell programs like Vim and Emacs to scroll (ESC [ 5 ~ and ESC [ 6 ~).

If you want these keys to send character sequences to the terminal without the Shift modifier, you can customize the keyboard map:

Terminal > Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Keyboard

If you do this, I recommend you invert the meaning of the Shift modifier for these keys by swapping the mappings for the shifted and unshifted keys, so that the alternative behaviors are still available. Also, see the View menu, which contains scrolling commands that use the Command modifier so they're available regardless of the terminal keyboard map.

Similarly, Shift-Home and Shift-End are mapped to move to the start/end of the current line (ESC [ H and ESC [ F)—they're understood by bash; you may have to customize vim understand them, or edit the mappings specifically for Vim. (On other OSes, Home and End are used for start/end of line, so Terminal provides them with the Shift modifier for symmetry.)

Control-Left Arrow and Control-Right Arrow are also mapped to "move to start/end of line" sequences by default, though they're different from the ones mapped to Shift-Home and Shift-End. Instead, they're mapped to the Emacs- and Bash-compatible sequences ESC [ 5 D and ESC [ 5 C. Assuming these aren't in use by Vim, the simplest approach would be to customize Vim to accept these, using ~/.vimrc.

Answer 2

This isn't specifically a mac question, this is really a vi question.

In navigation mode, ctrl-f scrolls down a page and ctrl-b scrolls up a page (think "F"orward and "B"ack). Ctrl-d scrolls down half a page, and ctrl-u scrolls up half a page.

^ takes you to the beginning of a line, and $ to the end. I know, I know, but there are historical reasons for that.

Here's a really good cheat-sheet on vi controls. vi is a little bit arcane, but once you internalize it, it's the quickest and slickest text editor in the world.