Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

A Look Ahead

Part II covers Vim in excruciating detail. Seven full chapters cover the topics listed here, as well as the important subject of writing scripts for Vim, which provide much of the power and usefulness that come “out of the box” with that editor.

The three chapters in Part III cover nvi, elvis, and vile, in that order. Each chapter has the following outline:

1. Who wrote the editor, and why.

2. Important command-line arguments.

3. Online help and other documentation.

4. Initialization—what files and environment variables the program reads, and in what order.

5. Multiwindow editing.

6. GUI interface(s), if any.

7. Extended regular expressions.

8. Improved editing facilities (tag stacks, infinite undo, etc.).

9. Programming assistance (edit-compile speedup, syntax highlighting).

10. Interesting features unique to the program.

11. Where to get the sources, and what operating systems the editor runs on.

    All of the distributions are compressed with gzip, GNU zip. If you don’t already have it, you can get gzip from ftp://ftp.gnu.org//gnu/gzip/gzip-1.3.12.tar.^[48] The untar.c program available from the elvis FTP site is a very portable, simple program for unpacking gziped tar files on non-Unix systems.

Because each of the programs discussed in Part III continues to undergo development, we have not attempted an exhaustive treatment of each one’s features. Such an approach would quickly become outdated. Instead, we have “hit the highlights,” covering the features that you are most likely to need and that are least likely to ...