November 1998
Beginner
352 pages
7h 46m
English
Content preview from Learning the vi Editor, Sixth Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
11.2. Important Command-Line Arguments
vim looks at how it was invoked to decide how it should behave. If invoked as ex, it will operate as a line editor. It also allows the Q command from vi mode to switch into ex mode. If invoked as view, it will start in vi mode, but mark each file initially as being read-only.
When invoked as gvim or gview, vim will start the GUI version, under X Windows or in whatever other graphical interface is appropriate. If a leading r is prepended to any of the names, vim enters "restricted" mode, where certain actions are disabled.
vim has a large number of command-line options. The most useful are described here:
-c command
Execute command upon startup. This is the POSIX version of the historical +command syntax, but vim is not limited to positioning commands. (The old syntax is also accepted.) You can give up to ten -c commands.
-R
Start in read-only mode, setting the readonly option.
-r
Recover specified files, or if no files are listed on the command line, list all the files that can be recovered.
-s
Enter batch (script) mode. This is only for ex, and is intended for running editing scripts. This is the POSIX version of the historic "-" argument.
-b
Start in binary mode. This sets a few options that make it possible to edit a binary file.
-f
For the GUI version, stay in the foreground. This should be used by programs that invoke vim and wait for it to finish, such as mail handling programs.
-g
Start the GUI version of vim, if it has been ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.