A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

Chapter 6. The vim Editor

IN THIS CHAPTER

Tutorial: Creating and Editing a File with vim 141

Introduction to vim Features 148

Online Help 149

Command Mode: Moving the Cursor 154

Input Mode 158

Command Mode: Deleting and Changing Text 160

Searching and Substituting 164

Yank, Put, and Delete Commands 171

The General-Purpose Buffer 171

Reading and Writing Files 174

The .vimrc Startup File 176

This chapter begins with a history and description of vi, the original, powerful, sometimes cryptic, interactive, visually oriented text editor. The chapter continues with a tutorial that explains how to use vim (vi improved—a vi clone supplied with or available for most Linux distributions) to create and edit a file. Much of the tutorial and the balance of the chapter ...