Vim Jump List

One trick which will certainly power-up your Vim proficiency is to make use of the Vim jump list. Jumps are cursor movements stored in a list called the jumplist. When making certain movements, such as jumping to line 42 with 42G, Vim will save it as a “jump” in the jumplist. You can list jumps using the :jumps command.

• To move backwards through the jump list to an older jump use <ctrl-o>.
• To move to a newer jump use <ctrl-i>. You can also press <tab>.

Vim Jumplist Demo

This short screencast shows how efficiently you can move back and forth through a file with the jumplist:

Many shorter movements, like regular hjkl and those based on motions do not modify the jumplist. So their movements will not be navigable with <ctrl-o> and <ctrl-i>. Similarly, the colon line number (:42) movement does not modify the jump list. Use <line number>G instead of :<line number> to create a point in your jump history.

Examples movements which modify the jump list are:

• /pattern searches and ?pattern searches (forward and backward pattern matching)
• * and # (forward and backward search for the word under the cursor.
• % (jump to a matching enclosing character like paren, brace, bracket, etc)
• Any inter-file navigation like gf

Keep in mind that the Vim jump list is a stack, similar to your browsing history. If you jump back several points and then create a new jump point in the middle of your history, then jump list points after that will be cleared. Your next jumps will continue building the stack.

Viewing and Clearing the Vim Jump List

You can view the jump list with the :jumps command. Vim shows a jump number, the line and column number, and the file name or text of each jump in your history. The left column can be useful for jumping faster through your history. Note the number there is a number relative to your current position in the history. You can prepend that number before <ctrl-o> or <ctrl-i> to move more rapidly. As a demonstration, by pressing 3<ctrl-o> you can jump back to thing.html from the jump list example below:

    jump  line  col  file/text
      3     23    4  thing.html
      2      1    0  some text
      1	    70    0  another line
   >  0   1154   23  end.
      1   1167    0  foo bar

Vim will store up to 100 locations in your jump list. If you ever want to clear them all out, run the command :clearjumps and your jumplist history will be wiped clean.

For more info, check out :help jumplist in Vim. Also be sure to read about the Vim change list which is similar to but different from the Vim jump list.