Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Online Help and Other Documentation

nvi comes with quite comprehensive printable documentation. In particular, it comes with troff source, formatted ASCII, and formatted PostScript for the following documents:

The vi reference manual

The reference manual for nvi. This manual describes all of the nvi command-line options, commands, options, and ex commands.

The vi manpage

The manpage for nvi.

The vi tutorial

This document is a tutorial introduction to editing with vi.

The ex reference manual

The reference manual for ex. This manual is the original one for ex; it is a bit out-of-date with respect to the facilities in nvi.

Also included are ASCII files that document some of the nvi internals and provide a list of features that should be implemented, along with files that can be used as an online tutorial to vi.

The online help built into nvi is minimal, consisting of two commands, :exusage and :viusage. These commands provide one-line summaries of each ex and vi command. This is usually sufficient to remind you about how something works, but not very good for learning about new or obscure features in nvi.

You can give a command as an argument to the :exusage and :viusage commands, in which case nvi will display the help just for that command. nvi prints one line explaining what the command does, and a one-line summary of the command’s usage.