How to navigate long lines like separate lines?

Question

When I have a very long line in vim it will be shown on the screen as multiple lines, like this:

line no. | content                                           |
100      | this is a very looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo | 
         | ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo | 
         | ooooooong line!                                   |
101      | this is the next line                             |

when I type k on line 101 I will jump to the first line of line 100 (which is very counter-intuitive for me), is there a way that I could type 3 ks from line 101 to navigate the line 100?

Answer 1

You can use the gj and gk commands to move the cursor to the character in the next or previous display lines, even when lines wrap.

See :help gj and :help gk for details.

If you would like to navigate those display lines using j and k, you can remap them in your .vimrc:

nnoremap j gj
nnoremap k gk

Beware that these remappings have side effects, for instance commands such as dj will behave differently even on lines that are not wrapped, since gj is not a linewise motion while j is. (The original dj will delete two lines, while the modified one won't.)

Answer 2

Here is an excerpt from my ~/.vimrc, which uses gk and gj commands to handle navigation through long lines:

nnoremap <Up>   gk
nnoremap <Down> gj
xnoremap <Up>   gk
xnoremap <Down> gj
inoremap <Up>   <C-O>gk
inoremap <Down> <C-O>gj

With these remaps in place, navigating through long lines using the arrow keys works just as expected in Normal (nnoremap), Visual (xnoremap) and Insert (inoremap) modes. See also :h i_CTRL-O.