Vim Navigation in insert mode effectively

Question

I know that in insert mode I could navigate through the document by using the arrow keys or by using Ctrl-o to escape insert mode temporarily. My question is: Is there any other way to navigate through documents instead of using those keys or temporarily escaping?

Thank you.

OK guys, just found a solution for my own question in which I use imap to map keys in Vim in insert mode.

 imap <C-n> <Down>
 imap <C-p> <Up>
 imap <C-@> <C-Space>

Answer 1

Another upvote for @garyjohn's comment, here.

By following that path, you are certainly shooting yourself in the foot. I see at least two big mistakes in your approach.

• As @garyjohn wrote, you are "fighting" against Vim's most crucial aspect. Modality is at the core of everything that makes it the awesome text editor it is. If you consider its proverbially steep learning curve, actively going against its design won't get you far up.

• Like many others, you focus your "dumbing down Vim" effort on movements like <up>, <down> and friends. Vim has much better ways to move around in and between buffers: wWeEbB/?tTfF{}[] and so on. All these motions give you super powers. All these motions depend on modality in one way or another.

  Rejecting these incredibly useful tools is a very bad mistake in and of itself. Remapping them would be both very tough and utterly worthless.

  FYI, when I started Vim, I spent months trying to turn it into a TextMate clone. Trying to create insert mode mappings for everything was probably one the most frustrating endeavour of my whole career. I learned two things in the process, though:

  1. my beloved TextMate was seriously underpowered compared to Vim so it made absolutely no sense to dumb down Vim, and…

  2. modes freaking rule.

Accept Vim's philosophy instead of rejecting it. Or reject it and use Sublime Text 2 instead, for what we care.

Answer 2

I agree with @garyjohn - besides, Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p are things I use for autocompletion or automatic spelling completion - I wouldn't map those to something else. All the same, Ctrl-w will delete one word before the cursor, and Ctrl-u will delete everything before the cursor, so at least you could use these shortcuts (which also work in a shell).

Answer 3

Just to hammer this home: If you stay in insert mode for long, you're doing something wrong. The pattern in Vi(m) is: Move around in normal mode. Make short inserts (a word here, a sentence there). Or manipulate the text with Ex commands like :substitute. Repeat.

Try to teach yourself to leave insert mode (via <Esc>, hopefully conveniently accessible on your keyboard) as soon as the stream of characters coming from your brain starts to trickle off. The next insertion is just an i / a away.