A Practical Guide to UNIX for Mac OS X Users

6 The vim Editor

In This Chapter

Tutorial: Creating and Editing a File with vim

Introduction to vim Features

Online Help

Command Mode: Moving the Cursor

Input Mode

Command Mode: Deleting and Changing Text

Searching and Substituting

Yank, Put, and Delete Commands

The General-Purpose Buffer

Reading and Writing Files

The .vimrc Startup File

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 Mac OS X 10.3 and later and available for most UNIX distributions) to create and edit a file. Much of the tutorial and the balance of the chapter apply to vi and ...