Vim: Move cursor to its last position

vim

Is it possible in (g)Vim to move the cursor to its previous position (while in normal mode)? Something to cycle back and forth in the list of previous cursor positions would be ideal. But also just to switch to the last location would suffice (something like cd - in bash with directories).

Here's a little demonstration:

line |1| <- cursor position
line 2
line 3
line 4

And suppose I did 2j, here's how it is now:

line 1
line 2
line |3| <- cursor position
line 4

Now I'd like to press something (other than 2k obviously) to move back to the first position and possibly to previous positions.

Best Answer

The quickest way is to hit either:

''

(two apostrophes) or:

``

(two backticks). Note that the difference is that the backtick goes to the same location on the line, whereas the apostrophe goes to the start of the line. On a UK keyboard, the apostrophe is more accessible, so I tend to use that one. There are loads of useful marks like this, see :help mark-motions.

For some other motions (not 2j I think), there's also the jump-list that lets you navigate back and forth among a number of motions. CtrlO and CtrlI do this navigation, but see :help jump-motions for more information.

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