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I'm having trouble understanding the cursor in the context of Vim commands, e.g. insertion, deletion, movement, etc:

  • When the cursor is hovering over a character and I want to delete until the end of the line, or to the beginning of the line, should I expect that the character it's pointing to will also be deleted?
  • When I enter insert mode, should I expect that the insertion will take place before or after the current character?
  • What about when pasting with p?

I'm not looking for specific answers to these examples, I'm looking for a general explanation or rules to understand the "current position" so I don't keep executing commands that end up being off by 1 character because I misinterpreted it. In GUI editors the caret usually sits between instead of on top of characters, so it's never been a source of confusion.

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    You said you don't want specific answer but that's what you should be looking for: Deleting until the end of the line see :h D and you'll read Delete the characters under the cursor until the end of the line, entering insert mode if you use a you append text after the cursor if you use i you insert text before the cursor, if you read :h p and scroll to :h P you'll see that one command is 'paste before' and the other 'paste after'... Your best option is to read the doc
    – statox
    Dec 13, 2016 at 9:01
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    Note that Vim allows you to configure the shape of the cursor fairly extensively (see :help guicursor). I wouldn't recommend that you change it to be a vertical-bar type cursor when in normal mode (It might help you interpret motions, but I think it would make commands like a and p confusing), but you can.
    – Rich
    Dec 13, 2016 at 10:24
  • @statox sure, but I assumed there was a general principle / rhyme / reason to why the commands worked the way they did, and that it would be consistent across these commands and commands I haven't yet encountered where I can anticipate behavior. Ingo Karkat's answer shed some light in this respect.
    – Kvass
    Dec 13, 2016 at 19:31

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The right mental model is that the cursor is before the current character. So, any {motion} that moves to the right (e.g. $, w) includes the character under the cursor, whereas any motion to the left (e.g. ^) excludes it.

Likewise, i inserts before the current character, whereas a appends after it. Same for pasting with P (before) / p (after).

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