Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

About the Previous Editions

In the fifth edition of this book (then called Learning the vi Editor), the ex editor commands were first discussed more fully. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, the complex features of ex and vi were clarified by adding more examples, in topics such as regular expression syntax, global replacement, .exrc files, word abbreviations, keyboard maps, and editing scripts. A few of the examples were drawn from articles in Unix World magazine. Walter Zintz wrote a two-part tutorial^[1] on vi that taught us a few things we didn’t know, and that also had a lot of clever examples illustrating features we did already cover in the book. Ray Swartz also had a helpful tip in one of his columns.^[2] We are grateful for the ideas in these articles.

The sixth edition of Learning the vi Editor introduced coverage of four freely available “clones,” or work-alike editors. Many of them have improvements over the original vi. One could thus say that there is a “family” of vi editors, and the book’s goal was to teach you what you need to know to use them. That edition treated nvi, Vim, elvis, and vile equally.

The sixth edition also added the following features:

• Many minor corrections and additions were made to the basic text.

• For each chapter where appropriate, a command summary was added at the end.

• New chapters covered each vi clone, the features and/or extensions common to two or more of the clones, and multiwindow editing.

• The chapters for each vi clone described a bit of that program’s ...