Mastering the VI editor [Home] [Up] Mastering the VI editor. Shamelessly stolen from the. University of Hawaii at Manoa. College of Engineering. The VI editor is a screen- based editor used by many Unix users. The VI editor. has powerful features to aid programmers, but many beginning users avoid using. VI because the different features overwhelm them. This tutorial is written to. VI editor, but also contains. VI as well. Examples are provided, and. VI and VIM Linux editor tutorial of advanced editing features and tricks. This tutorial covers advanced use, tagging, vim plugins and integration with cscope. The YoLinux portal covers topics from desktop to servers and from. Vi has two modes insertion mode and command mode. The editor begins in command mode, where the cursor movement and text deletion and pasting occur. Insertion mode begins upon entering an insertion or change command. [ESC. How do I make the vi editor display or hide line numbers? To make vi display line numbers, you need to set the number flag. To do so: Press the Esc key if you are currently in insert or append mode. Press : (the colon). The. VI----- How to Use VI -----(Notes for Rice Astro majors) vi and emacs are the two editors of choice for unix machines. Both are quick, versatile and powerful. Emacs has a few more bells and. Vi Text Editor Tutorial. vi is a very powerful text editor. It runs in a standard terminal and uses the standard keyboard (it is not reliant on the arrow keys, or the insert, home, pgup keys). This makes it equally as useful. Mastering the VI editor. Shamelessly stolen from the University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Engineering. Jump to the index. There's no better way than to experience things yourself. In this tutorial, the following convention will be used. X denotes a control character. For example, if you see: ^d in. For this example, you would hold down the control. The VI editor uses the full screen, so it needs to know what kind of terminal. When you log in, wiliki should ask you what terminal you have. The. prompt looks like this. TERM = (vt. 10. 0). If you know your terminal is a vt. If you have an hp terminal. If you are not sure. If you make an error when you log in and type the wrong terminal type, don't. You can type the following commands to fix the settings. First, tell your shell what type of terminal you have. If you're not sure. SHELL.) For the examples given, the terminal type is. Substitute it with whatever terminal type you have. For C shell (/bin/csh), the command is this. For Bourne Shell (/bin/sh) or Korn Shell (/bin/ksh), the commands are the. TERM. TERM=vt. 10. Learn how to use the vi editor, found on almost every UNIX and Linux system. You can use the material in this tutorial to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn for fun. This mode-oriented aspect of the vi editor differs from many other editors in this respect. With modeless editors such as joe and emacs, for instance, to insert text at the cursor position, one simply starts typing, and to. Vi Modes. Command Mode. Command mode is the mode you are in when you start (default mode) Command mode is the mode in which commands are given to move around in the file, to make changes, and to leave the. Next, reset your terminal with this command. Now that the terminal type is (hopefully) correctly set, you are ready to. VI. The VI editor lets a user create new files or edit existing files. The command. to start the VI editor is vi, followed by the filename. For example. to edit a file called temporary, you would type vi temporary. You can start VI without a filename, but when you want to. VI which filename to save it into. When you start VI for the first time, you will see a screen filled with tildes. A tilde looks like this: ~) on the left side of the screen. Any blank lines. beyond the end of the file are shown this way. At the bottom of your screen. If the file you specified does not exist, then it will tell you that it is a. New file]. If you started VI without a filename, the bottom line of the screen will just. VI starts. If the screen does not show you these expected. Just type : q and return. VI, and fix your terminal type. If you. don't know how, ask a lab monitor. Now that you know how to get into VI, it would be a good idea to know how to. The VI editor has two modes and in order. VI, you have to be in command mode. Hit the key labeled. Escape" or "Esc" (If your terminal does not have such a key. If you were. already in the command mode when you hit "Escape", don't worry. It. might beep, but you will still be in the command mode. The command to quit out of VI is : q. Once in command mode. If your file has been modified in any. To ignore this. message, the command to quit out of VI without saving is : q! This. lets you exit VI without saving any of the changes. Of course, normally in an editor, you would want to save the changes you. The command to save the contents of the editor is : w. You. can combine the above command with the quit command, or : wq. You can. specify a different file name to save to by specifying the name after the. For example, if you wanted to save the file you were working as. Another way to save your changes and exit out of VI is the ZZ command. When in command mode, type ZZ and it will do the equivalent of. If any changes were made to the file, it will be saved. This is. the easiest way to leave the editor, with only two keystrokes. The first thing most users learn about the VI editor is that it has two modes. The command mode allows the entry of. These commands are usually one or two characters. The insert mode puts. VI starts out in command mode. There are several commands that put the. VI editor into insert mode. The most commonly used commands to get into. These two commands are described. Once you are in insert mode, you get out of it by hitting the. If your terminal does not have an escape key. You can hit escape two times in a row and VI would. Hitting escape while you are. It may beep to tell you that you are already in that mode. The command mode commands are normally in this format: (Optional arguments are. Most commands are one character long, including those which use control. The commands described in this section are those which are used. VI editor. The count is entered as a number beginning with any character from 1. For example, the x command deletes a character under the. If you type 2. 3x while in command mode, it will. Some commands use an optional where parameter, where you can specify. Here is a simple set of commands to get a beginning VI user started. There are. many other convenient commands, which will be discussed in later sections. If you specify a count, all the text. If you specify a count, all the text. Specify count to. Typing u again will re- do. Count specifies how many. The characters will be deleted after the cursor. The VI editor has 3. Any time a block of text is deleted or yanked from the file. Most users of VI rarely. The block of text is also stored in another buffer as well, if it is. The buffer is specified using the " command. After. typing ", a letter or digit specifying the buffer must be entered. For example, the command: "mdd uses the buffer m, and the. Similarly, text can be. P command. "mp pastes the contents of buffer m after the current cursor. For any of the commands used in the next two sections, these buffers. The command commonly used command for cutting is d. This command. deletes text from the file. The command is preceded by an optional. If you double the. Here are some. combinations of these. There is also the y command which operates similarly to the. The commands to paste are p and P. The only differ in the. P. pastes the specified or general buffer before the cursor position. Specifying. count before the paste command pastes text the specified number of. The VI editor has features to help programmers format their code neatly. There is a variable that to set up the indentation for each level of nesting. In order to set it up, see the customization. For example, the command to set the shift. The following commands indent your lines or remove the indentation, and can. Shifts the current line to the left by one shift width. Shifts the current line to the right by one shift width. The VI editor also has a helpful feature which checks your source code for. The % command will look for the. Place the cursor onto a parenthesis or brace and type. This is. useful to check for unclosed parentheses or braces. If a parenthesis or brace. VI will beep at you to. The VI editor has two kinds of searches: string and character. For a string. search, the / and ? When you start these. These two commands differ only in. The / command searches. The n and N commands repeat. Some characters have special meanings to VI, so they must be preceded by a. Special characters. Beginning of the line. At the beginning of a search expression.). Matches a single character. Matches zero or more of the previous character. End of the line (At the end of the search expression.). Starts a set of matching, or non- matching expressions.. For example. /f[iae]t matches either of these: fit fat fet In this form, it matches. Put in an expression escaped with the backslash to find the ending. For example: /\< the\> should find only word. See the '< ' character description above. The character search searches within one line to find a character entered. The f and F commands search for a. F searches backwards and the cursor moves to the position of the. The t and T commands search for a character on the current. T searches the line backwards to the position after. These two sets of commands can be repeated using the ; or . You can customize the way VI behaves upon start up. There are several edit. VI and EX. editor options available on Wiliki: (You can get this list by typing. IPLPPPQPP LIpplpipnpbp term=xterm. NHSHH HUuhsh+c wrapscan. Some of these options have values set with the equals sign '=' in it, while. These on or off type of options are called. Boolean, and have "no" in front of them to indicate that they are not. The options shown here are the options that are set without any. Descriptions of some of these are given below, with an. For example, the command set autoindent, you can type. To unset it, you can type. This option sets the editor so that lines following an. If you. want to back over this indentation, you can type ^D at the very. This ^D works in the insert. Also, the width of the indentations. The . exrc file in the current directory is read during. This has to be set either in the environment variable. EXINIT or in the . Turn off messages if this option is unset using. Displays lines with line numbers on the left side. This option takes a value, and determines the width of. The software tabstop is used for the. For example, you would. This option is used to show the actual mode of the. If you are in insert mode, the. INPUT MODE. warn. This option warns you if you have modified the file, but haven't. This option sets up the number of lines on the window that. VI uses. For example, to set the VI editor to use only 1. This option affects the behavior of the word search. If. wrapscan is set, if the word is not found at the bottom of the. If this option has a value greater than zero, the editor. That is, if you get to within that many. For example, to set the wrap margin to two. One EX editor command that is useful in the VI editor is the abbreviate. This lets you set up abbreviations for specific strings. The command. looks like this: : ab string thing to substitute for. For example, if. you had to type the name, "Humuhumunukunukuapua`a" but you didn't. For this. example, the command is entered like this: : ab 9u Humuhumunukunukuapua`a. Now, whenever you type 9u as a separate word, VI will type in the. If you typed in 9university, it will not substitute. To remove a previously defined abbreviation, the command is unabbreviate.
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