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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T07:33:30+00:00

I use horizontal and vertical window splits in religiously in VIM and up until

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I use horizontal and vertical window splits in religiously in VIM and up until recently, I enjoyed the comfort of two commands to effectively hide (or minimize) my horizontal splits. I set them up adding the following lines to my .vimrc file:

set winminheight=0
map <C-J> <C-W>j<C-W>_
map <C-K> <C-W>k<C-W>_

Hitting Control-j or Control-k navigates through horizontal splits by going up or down. What I’d like to accomplish is the same thing for vertical splits by showing or hiding the left or right split using Control-Shift-h and Control-Shift-l; h moving to the left, l moving to the right. I have tried the following with little to no success:

set winminwidth=0
map <S-C-L> 500<C-W>h<C-W>_
map <S-C-H> 500<C-W>l<C-W>_

The action would be similar to utilizing Control-w-< and Control-w->, only moving the vertical split completely to the left or write, not just one line at a time.

Any ideas on how to accomplish this? Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    First up, you won’t be able to use <S-C- (shift + control) in your code (see below). But you can use the ‘mapleader’ as your “shift” and then use the <C-h> and <C-l> like you want to. Like this:

    set winminwidth=0
nmap <Leader><C-h> <C-W>h500<C-W>>             
nmap <Leader><C-l> <C-W>l500<C-W>>

    The common leader keys in vim are comma and back-slash:

    :let mapleader = ","

    But you’ll find that this gets annoying to require 3 keystrokes for this, so you might as well just drop the control key stroke. This way (if your leader is comma) you can just press “,h” and “,l” to go to the splits to your left and right:

    set winminwidth=0
nmap <Leader>h <C-W>h500<C-W>>             
nmap <Leader>l <C-W>l500<C-W>>       

" (FTW) :D

    …

    A guy named Tony Chapman answers why you can’t use control + shift:

    Vim maps its Ctrl+printable_key
    combinations according to ASCII. This
    means that “Ctrl+lowercase letter” is
    the same as the corresponding
    “Ctrl+uppercase letter” and that
    Ctrl+<key> (where <key> is a printable
    key) is only defined when <key> is in
    the range 0x40-0x5F, a lowercase
    letter, or a question mark. It also
    means that Ctrl-[ is the same as Esc,
    Ctrl-M is the same as Enter, Ctrl-I is
    the same as Tab.

    So yes, Ctrl-s and Ctrl-S (i.e. Ctrl-s
    and Ctrl-Shift-s) are the same to
    Vim. This is by design and is not
    going to change.

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