Making bigger strides

Very rarely, when editing text, are you concerned with the individual characters. More often, you’re interested in the larger structure that those characters represent. It’s far more efficient to think in terms of words and paragraphs instead of individual characters.

Luckily, Helix has commands that can help us here.

Words

In terms of words, Helix offers the following commands:

• w for jumping forward to the next word
• b for jumping back to the beginning of the word
• e for jumping forward to the end of the word

Watch the highlight as you press them: w selects from the cursor up to the start of the next word, so the cursor comes to rest on the space just before it. e and b land on the word’s last and first letter. Each motion selects the text it crossed — that selection is what you’ll act on in the next lesson.

WORDS

That’s not a typo. Helix makes a distinction between ‘words’ and ‘WORDS’. Without getting too deep into the details, a ‘word’ generally represents what you might think of intuitively as a word. A ‘WORD’, on the other hand, consists entirely of non-blank characters.

The motions for WORDS are just the uppercase of the word motions.

• W for jumping forward to the next WORD
• B for jumping back to the beginning of the WORD
• E for jumping forward to the end of the WORD

Paragraphs

You can use ]p and [p to jump forward and backward between paragraphs. This doesn’t just mean paragraphs of prose, though — it’s really useful for jumping around blocks of code if you’re a software engineer.

Work through the checklist below — then try W/B/E on the demo text while you’re there.