Question

Basically, I don’t want to use my arrow keys completely.

But for that to happen the Ctrl-P needs
to have the same functionality in
the command-line as my Up arrow key.

For Example, I type

:so

then I press Up, it turns like so

:source $MYVIMRC

but when I press Ctrl-P, it only goes to the last executed
command

:h camelcasemotion

Can anyone help me with this? It would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

In command mode, <Up> does “move to the previous command in the history that matches the string entered so far”.

In command mode,
CTRL-P has two functions.

• After a Tab completion that has multiple possibilities, it does “show the previous matching value”.
  Think of it as backward Tab. Most terminals do not distinguish Tab from Shift-Tab, but it and CTRL-P are the same mapping in GUI versions of Vim.
• Without a preceding Tab completion, it does “move to the previous command in the history” (without trying to match the text entered so far).

You can remap CTRL-P to be the same as <Up> if you really want to:

:cmap <C-P> <Up>

You might also want to remap CTRL-N, too:

:cmap <C-N> <Down>