A quick vim cheatsheet for those of us who enjoy using vim, but don’t use it often enough to have the command sequences committed to memory.
Starting with the simplest operations, and then moving on to a few more complex and difficult to remember ones.
Remember that you always start in normal/visual mode. To enter insert mode to start entering text, you can use i or I.
Quit without saving: :q!
Quit and write changes: :wq
Enter insert mode at beginning or end of current line: I
Enter insert mode at the current position of the cursor: i
Escape current mode: Esc
Search forward for text pattern: /text
Search backward for text pattern: ?text
Go to bottom of page: G
Go to top of page: gg
Copy/paste style vim operations:
Copy and line (yank): yy
Paste a ‘yanked’ line: p (after) or P (before) cursor.
Delete character before cursor: X and after cursor: x
Delete current line: dd
Delete current line and start insert mode: cc
Deleting
Delete all lines in file: ddgD
Sorting
Sort all lines (no range): :sort
Sort all lines (no range, reversed): :sort!
Add options to the sort command:
i – ignore case
n – sort based on the first decimal on the line
f – sort based on the first float on the line
Some useful, yet more arcane vim operations:
Clear all lines in a file (1 is the first line, $ is the last line, and d is delete): :1,$d
Insert the result of Vimscript expressions into your file:
Enter Vim’s command line: Enter INSERT mode, and type CTRL + R =
Type a Vimscript expression, for example system("ls") and press ENTER
The output of the command ls will be inserted into the buffer.
Example of the above vimscript expression register result insert:
This of course only scratches the surface of the surface of what can be done. It’s just a quick little vim cheatsheet that I’ll refer back to when I get a little rusty.
The advanced or more arcane commands are the useful ones that I tend to forget when I’m not using them on a daily basis. I’ll certainly be recalling this post and updating those with new ones that I find useful in the future.
ffmpeg is a very useful utility to have installed for common audio and video conversion and modification tasks. I find myself using it frequently for both personal and work use.
Got an audio or video file to compress or convert? Or maybe you’re looking to split off a section of a video file. Did you do a screen recording of a meeting session and find you need to share it around, but it’s way too large in filesize?
ffmpeg is the clean and easy command line approach. I’ve put together a ffmpeg cheat sheet below that has some quick and easy usages documented.
Skip ahead to the ffmpeg Cheat Sheet section below if you already have it installed and ready to go.
Installing ffmpeg (macOS / Windows)
On macOS, you’re best off using homebrew. If you don’t have homebrew already, go get that done first. Then:
macOS
brew install ffmpeg
Windows
You can grab a release build in 7-zip archive format from here (recent as of the publish date of this post). Be sure to check the main ffmpeg downloads page for newer builds if you’re reading this page way in the future.
If you don’t have 7-zip, download and install that first to decompress the downloaded ffmpeg release archive.
Now you’ll ideally want to update your user PATH to include the path that you’ve extracted 7-zip to. Make sure you’ve moved it to a convenient location. For example on my Windows machine, I keep ffmpeg in D:\Tools\ffmpeg.
Open PowerShell (Windows key + R), type powershell, hit enter.
To ensure that the path persists whenever you run powershell in the future, in powershell, run:
notepad $profile
This will load a start-up profile for powershell in notepad. If it doesn’t exist yet, it’ll prompt you to create a new file. Choose yes.
In your profile notepad window, enter the following, replacing D:\Tools\ffmpeg with the path you extracted ffmpeg to on your own machine.
Close Notepad and save the changes. Close Powershell, then launch it again. This time if you type ffmpeg in the powershell window you’ll run it, no matter which directory you’re in.
ffmpeg Cheat Sheet
This is a list of my 10 most useful ffmpeg commands for conversion and modification of video and audio files.
Bonus batch scripts for video file re-sizing below. For example, iterate over every .MP4 file in a directory and resize to 1080p, or every file prefixed with DJI_ and resize to 1440p:
for f in *.MP4 ; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -s 1920x1080 -c:a copy "resized-1080p-$f" ; done
for f in DJI_* ; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -s 2560x1440 -c:a copy "resized-1440p-$f" ; done
Yes, that is a banana logo overlayed onto this video using ffmpeg.
This list doesn’t even scratch the surface of the capabilities of ffmpeg. If you dig deeper you’ll find commands and parameters for just every audio and video modification process you need.
Remember, while it’s often easy to find a free conversion tool online, there’ll always be a catch or risk of using these. Whether it’s being subjected to unecessary advertising, catching potential malware, or being tracked with 3rd party cookies, you always take risks using free online tools. I guarantee almost every single free conversion website is using ffmpeg on their backend.
So do yourself a favour and practice and using CLI tools to do things yourself.
