Vim Part 4 - More of Insert mode

May 17, 2026

In this post I will try to introduce four more ways to enter Insert mode that will make your life easier. In addition to entering Insert mode, they do it with a motion.

Jump to the end of a line

Imagine you are stuck somewhere in the middle of a line and you want to jump to the end and continue typing. You could press $ followed by a and that would be totally fine. In fact, if you feel like that is easier for you, do not even bother trying to change that.

But with A you can achieve the same result with only one click. Not only that, but reaching $ may seem akward to some of you.

I would not say that it is a big optimization. Nevertheless, almost every time after jumping to the end of the line I start typing. Because of that, I absute the crap out of A all the time.

Jump to the beginning of a line

Just like you can jump straight to the end of a line, you can jump to the beginning by pressing I.

Delete the line

Just like you can delete a character under the cursor and enter Insert mode, you can delete the whole line with S and enter Insert mode.

Jump to a new line

This command is, in my opinion, the MVP of Vim. I use it more than any other command from my arsenal.

In order to type this particular line I used it twice :)

The command is o. It creates a new line below the line where the cursor is, moves the cursor there, and enters Insert mode.

Move the current line and create a new one

Another beautiful command that achives almost the same as o is ... O. O moves the current line lower by 1 row, creates a new line in place of it, and enters Insert mode. This is an amazing command if you need to squeeze something in between the lines. In coding, I use it all the time after creating if-then statement like this:

if (true) {
} // cursor is here

Then I press O and it becomes

if (true) {
    // cursor is here
}

This can be applied to creating functions, classes, and anything else with brackets or scopes.

Conclusion

Whenever you need to use 0 or $, stop yourself for a second, and think if I or A could be used instead. Thinking like this is not what you want to do during coding. But I am encouraging you to experiment and see, if it works for you or not.