Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Scope of This Book

This book consists of 18 chapters and 4 appendixes, divided into 4 parts. Part I, is designed to get you started using vi quickly, and to follow up with advanced skills that will let you use it effectively.

The first two chapters, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2, present some simple vi commands with which you can get started. You should practice these until they are second nature. You could stop reading at the end of Chapter 2, having learned some elementary editing tools.

But vi is meant to do a lot more than rudimentary word processing; the variety of commands and options enables you to shortcut a lot of editing drudgery. Chapter 3, and Chapter 4, concentrate on easier ways to do tasks. During your first reading, you’ll get at least an idea of what vi can do and what commands you might harness for your specific needs. Later, you can come back to these chapters for further study.

Chapter 5, Chapter 6, and Chapter 7, provide tools that help you shift more of the editing burden to the computer. They introduce you to the ex line editor underlying vi, and they show you how to issue ex commands from within vi.

Chapter 8, provides an introduction to the extensions available in the four vi clones covered in this book. It centralizes in one place the descriptions of multiwindow editing, GUI interfaces, extended regular expressions, facilities that make editing easier, and several other features, providing a roadmap to what follows in the rest of this book. It also provides a pointer ...