Useful vi / vim short-cuts

Some useful vi / vim short-cuts that I'm always forgetting:

Copy and paste a block of text
5Y             Copy five lines of text
P                Paste the copied text
See also here for how to copy and paste a block of text.

Show hidden characters in a file
:set list       Show hidden characters
:set unlist   Hide the hidden characters

Moving around in the file
0                 Go to the start of a line
$                 Go to the end of a line
1G              Go to the start of the file
G                Go to the end of the file

Insert 50 '-'s in a row
'.' repeats the last text-changing command. You can type a number before a command in vi for it to be done a certain number of times. For example, if you want to make a line of 50 '-'s in a row, you can type '-', then press ESC, and type '50.' to get 50 '-'s.

 Toggle auto-indenting for paste

If you want to paste in code from a python script, but don't want the intenting to be messed up, you can type:

:set paste

You can then turn this off later using:

:set nopaste  

There is a nice VI cheat sheet here.