Moving Around

Getting the cursor where you want it is most of editing. HUME's motions are built so the common jumps — a word, a character on this line, a matching bracket, the line you were on a minute ago — are one or two keystrokes away.

All movement happens in Normal mode. Motions move the cursor and change the current selection.

Basic movement

Key	Movement
h	One character left
l	One character right
j	One line down
k	One line up
w/W	Select next word/WORD
b/B	Select previous word/WORD

A word breaks at punctuation, so don't is three words. A WORD only breaks at spaces, so don't is one WORD. Set word-chars (see Configuration) to widen what counts as a word — e.g. - makes foo-bar one word instead of three.

By default, w/W/b/B also cover the whitespace before the destination word — except the first word of a line, which takes its trailing whitespace instead, since a leading run there would be indentation. This means deleting a word never leaves a double space behind. Turn it off with :set global word-selects-whitespace=false (or per buffer) to select just the bare word instead — see Configuration.

Cursor on the first character, press w
default   Lorem ipsum dolor sit
off       Lorem ipsum dolor sit

Character find

Search within the current line for a specific character:

Key	Movement
f + char	Jump forward to next occurrence of char (inclusive)
F + char	Jump backward to previous occurrence of char (inclusive)
t + char	Jump forward to just before next occurrence of char (exclusive)
T + char	Jump backward to just after previous occurrence of char (exclusive)
=	Repeat last find forward
-	Repeat last find backward

After pressing f, F, t, or T, HUME waits for the target character. Tab counts as a target character.

Both are jumps, not extends — the selection collapses to a single character at the landing spot, not a span from where the cursor started:

Cursor on the first character, press f i
Lorem ipsum dolor sit

Cursor on the first character, press t i
Lorem ipsum dolor sit

Line movement

The idiomatic line movements live under the g prefix:

Key	Movement
g g	First line of file
g e	Last line of file
g h	Start of line
g l	End of line (last character)
g s	First non-whitespace character on the line
Home	Start of line
End	End of line

Matching pairs

Key	Movement
#	Jump to the matching bracket or tag

For a bracket on a single line, # looks at the whole selection, not just where the cursor sits — so it still finds ( ) [ ] { } after a selecting motion leaves the cursor just past one. A selection spanning multiple lines only looks at the character the cursor sits on, same as a tag. For an HTML/XML/JSX tag, the cursor itself must be inside the tag's own markup — its <, its >, the name, or an attribute — not just anywhere in the selection. Anywhere else, # does nothing. From an opening bracket or tag it jumps to the closing one, and back again from the closing side. A count has no effect — # always jumps to the immediate partner.

Structural navigation

For a language whose grammar ships a textobjects.scm (PLUM installs one alongside highlights where the upstream grammar has one), these commands jump to the next/previous instance of a structural kind and select it as a whole — cursor (head) on its first character:

Key	Command	Selects
g f / g F	goto-next-function / goto-prev-function	The next/previous function
g t / g T	goto-next-class / goto-prev-class	The next/previous class or type
g a / g A	goto-next-argument / goto-prev-argument	The next/previous argument
g c / g C	goto-next-comment / goto-prev-comment	The next/previous comment
g u / g U	goto-next-test / goto-prev-test	The next/previous unit test
g v / g V	goto-next-value / goto-prev-value	The next/previous array/tuple/struct value

Lowercase jumps forward, uppercase jumps backward — the same letter each kind uses as its text object key. Each also runs from the command mode prompt, e.g. :goto-next-function. They stop at either end of the buffer instead of wrapping, and each records a jump-list entry, so Ctrl+o returns to where you jumped from. Without a matching grammar, every one of these commands is a silent no-op.

Jump to a line by number

Type : then a line number and press Enter to jump there:

Command	Movement
:<n>	Jump to line <n> (e.g. :42)
:goto <n>	Same, full form

Line numbers are 1-based. A number past the end of the file lands on the last line. The jump is recorded, so Ctrl+o brings you back.

Paragraph movement

Key	Selects
{	The previous paragraph
}	The next paragraph

A paragraph is a block of non-empty lines delimited by empty lines. Both keys select the whole paragraph they land on, plus the empty-line gap below it, if it has one. The jump is recorded, so Ctrl+o brings you back. Pressing {/} past the first/last paragraph does nothing. See Text objects for m i p, which selects just the paragraph without moving.

Scrolling

Key	Effect
PageDown	Scroll one viewport down
PageUp	Scroll one viewport up
Ctrl+d	Scroll half a viewport down
Ctrl+u	Scroll half a viewport up

View prefix (z)

Press z followed by a second key to reposition the view (the cursor itself stays put):

Key	Effect
z k	Scroll cursor to top of screen
z z	Center view on cursor
z j	Scroll cursor to bottom of screen

k is up and j is down, the same axis the motion keys use.

Search navigation

Key	Effect
/pattern	Search forward
?pattern	Search backward
n	Next match
N	Previous match
*	Search the whole word under the cursor, ignoring any current selection. Words are wrapped in word boundaries (\b…\b); punctuation is searched literally. Does nothing on whitespace or a blank line. With word-chars configured, a match can still bleed into a longer run sharing the same edge character (e.g. searching foo-bar inside foo-bar-baz also matches there)
m /	Turn every search match in the buffer into a selection
Ctrl+/	Use the primary selection's text, literally, as the search pattern — no word expansion, no boundaries (kitty only). Does nothing when the selection is just a line ending

m / precondition

m / uses the buffer's live search pattern if one is active; otherwise it falls back to the search register s (the last pattern submitted to / or ?, or set by *). If neither is available it is a silent no-op — no error, selections unchanged. It runs from Normal or Extend mode. See Register prefix for the full list of registers.

Regex syntax

/, ?, s (sift-within), and * all use Rust regex syntax. Notable points:

• Smart case. A pattern with no uppercase letter matches case-insensitively; a single uppercase letter anywhere makes it case-sensitive. Note that this looks at the raw pattern text, so an escape like \W or \S counts as uppercase and will quietly make the search case-sensitive. Override with (?i) or (?-i).
• Other inline flags — (?m) multiline ^/$, (?s) dot-matches-newline, (?x) extended (whitespace ignored), (?U) swap greedy/non-greedy.
• . does not match newlines by default; use (?s) if you need it to.
• No backreferences, no lookaround, no possessive quantifiers. No Vim-style \c / \C case toggles either — they'd match the literal letters c / C.
• Invalid patterns do nothing during live preview: the cursor stays put. Pressing Enter on one still stores it, so n and N will do nothing until you search for something valid again.

Search and replace

HUME has no :s/foo/bar/g substitute command. Find-and-replace is done with multi-cursor selection:

1. Search for the pattern with /foo (or * on a word to match it).
2. Press m / to turn every match in the buffer into a selection.
3. Press c to change them all at once — type the replacement once and every selected instance updates together.
4. Esc returns you to Normal.

To replace within a single region instead of the whole buffer, select the region first (e.g. x for a line, or m i { for a block), then use s (sift-within) with a regex instead of m /.

Jump list

HUME maintains a jump list of recent cursor positions.

Key	Effect
Ctrl+o	Jump to previous position
Ctrl+i	Jump to next position
Tab	Jump to next position (except under the kitty protocol, where Tab moves between panes)

To get back to the buffer you were last in, use :b #. :e # does the same but only for buffers that have a file on disk.