Vim Tricks: Increment or decrement numbers

Another one of my favorite vim tricks is for the quick decrement or increment of numbers.

While in Normal mode, if you bring the cursor to a number, you can use ctrl+a to increment it or ctrl+x to decrement it. As with all vim commands, you can enter a number first and it will do the action that many times. So 400 ctrl+a will add 400 to the highlighted number.

The other fun thing this will do is automatically hop to the first number on a line, so if you have the letter “f” highlighted, but the number “418” is 50 characters to the right, ctrl+a or ctrl+x will hop 50 characters to the right and apply the action to the number.

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash