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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T06:59:16+00:00

I am having problems understanding how Vim commands are supposed to be executed as

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I am having problems understanding how Vim commands are supposed to be executed as keyboard actions. This is a topic I don’t see being discussed often. Some examples are:

<s-tab>

I believe this is s + tab but I don’t get the expected results.

<c-k>

I believe this is ctrl + k.

<C-k>

I sometimes see uppercase c but what is the difference?

And, inside of a Vim .vimrc file:

noremap <D-M-Left> :tabprevious<cr>
noremap <D-M-Right> :tabnext<cr>
nnoremap <c-j> <c-w>j
map <D-1> 1gt

My questions are:

  1. What does the case of a letter have to do with the command?
  2. Do the "<" ">" braces represent any action?
  3. Does the "-" dash represent any action?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    1. Nothing. <c-k> and <C-k> mean the same thing. By the way, <s is Shift.
    2. The <..> in this context is for Control/Shift key combinations. It can have a different meaning in other contexts such as search/replace.
    3. The dash is just part of the syntax representing these combinations.

    There are other special keys as well such as <CR> for Return/Enter, <Tab> for Tab, etc. They are usually intuitive and Vim is pretty flexible in what it will accept for these, especially in terms of case.

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