til/vim/go-to-beginning-and-end-of-line.md

Go To Beginning And End Of Line

There are two movements that I often find useful in Vim when trying to position my cursor relative to the current line.

• 0 - go to the first character of the line
• $ - go to the end of the line

For instance, I may use 0 to jump to beginning of a line so that I can then make a block-visual selection of several lines to insert some text in front of each line.

Or perhaps I'm already in visual mode and I want to move the cursor (and visual selection) to the end of the line. I hit $ to do that. Then I might y (yank) or c (delete into insert mode).

It's also worth noting that with code indentation, 0 moves the cursor to the very first position of the line whereas ^ moves the cursor to the first non-whitespace character. The former essentially accounts for code indentation. For example, imagine you're in the middle of line 3 in the following example. Depending on what you're trying to do, you may want to jump to one or the other position.

class Greeting
  def hello(name)
    puts "Hello, #{name || 'world'}!" # say hi
  end
end

See :h 0 for Vim help files on these motions. They are all located near each other.