Learning the vi and Vim Editors, Seventh Edition

Description

The standard guide for vi since 1986, this book has been expanded to include detailed information on vim, the leading vi clone that includes extra features for both beginners and power users. You learn text editing basics and advanced tools for both editors, such as writing macros and scripts to extend the editor, power tools for programmers, multi-window editing -- all in the easy-to-follow style that has made this book a classic.

Full Description

There's nothing that hard-core Unix and Linux users are more fanatical about than their text editor. Editors are the subject of adoration and worship, or of scorn and ridicule, depending upon whether the topic of discussion is your editor or someone else's.

vi has been the standard editor for close to 30 years. Popular on Unix and Linux, it has a growing following on Windows systems, too. Most experienced system administrators cite vi as their tool of choice. And since 1986, this book has been the guide for vi.

However, Unix systems are not what they were 30 years ago, and neither is this book. While retaining all the valuable features of previous editions, the 7th edition of Learning the vi and vim Editors has been expanded to include detailed information on vim, the leading vi clone. vim is the default version of vi on most Linux systems and on Mac OS X, and is available for many other operating systems too.

With this guide, you learn text editing basics and advanced tools for both editors, such as multi-window editing, how to write both interactive macros and scripts to extend the editor, and power tools for programmers -- all in the easy-to-follow style that has made this book a classic.

Learning the vi and vim Editors includes:

A complete introduction to text editing with vi:

How to move around vi in a hurry

Beyond the basics, such as using buffers

vi's global search and replacement

Advanced editing, including customizing vi and executing Unix commands

How to make full use of vim:

Extended text objects and more powerful regular expressions

Multi-window editing and powerful vim scripts

How to make full use of the GUI version of vim, called gvim

vim's enhancements for programmers, such as syntax highlighting, folding and extended tags

Coverage of three other popular vi clones -- nvi, elvis, and vile -- is also included. You'll find several valuable appendixes, including an alphabetical quick reference to both vi and ex mode commands for regular vi and for vim, plus an updated appendix on vi and the Internet.

Learning either vi or vim is required knowledge if you use Linux or Unix, and in either case, reading this book is essential. After reading this book, the choice of editor will be obvious for you too.

Table of Contents

Basic and Advanced vi
1. Chapter 1 The vi Text Editor
  1. A Brief Historical Perspective
  2. Opening and Closing Files
  3. Quitting Without Saving Edits
2. Chapter 2 Simple Editing
  1. vi Commands
  2. Moving the Cursor
  3. Simple Edits
  4. More Ways to Insert Text
  5. Joining Two Lines with J
  6. Review of Basic vi Commands
3. Chapter 3 Moving Around in a Hurry
  1. Movement by Screens
  2. Movement by Text Blocks
  3. Movement by Searches
  4. Movement by Line Number
  5. Review of vi Motion Commands
4. Chapter 4 Beyond the Basics
  1. More Command Combinations
  2. Options When Starting vi
  3. Making Use of Buffers
  4. Marking Your Place
  5. Other Advanced Edits
  6. Review of vi Buffer and Marking Commands
5. Chapter 5 Introducing the ex Editor
  1. ex Commands
  2. Editing with ex
  3. Saving and Exiting Files
  4. Copying a File into Another File
  5. Editing Multiple Files
6. Chapter 6 Global Replacement
  1. Confirming Substitutions
  2. Context-Sensitive Replacement
  3. Pattern-Matching Rules
  4. Pattern-Matching Examples
  5. A Final Look at Pattern Matching
7. Chapter 7 Advanced Editing
  1. Customizing vi
  2. Executing Unix Commands
  3. Saving Commands
  4. Using ex Scripts
  5. Editing Program Source Code
8. Chapter 8 Introduction to the vi Clones
  1. And These Are My Brothers, Darrell, Darrell, and Darrell
  2. Multiwindow Editing
  3. GUI Interfaces
  4. Extended Regular Expressions
  5. Enhanced Tags
  6. Improved Facilities
  7. Programming Assistance
  8. Editor Comparison Summary
  9. Nothing Like the Original
  10. A Look Ahead
Vim
1. Chapter 9 Vim (vi Improved): An Introduction
  1. Overview
  2. Where to Get Vim
  3. Getting Vim for Unix and GNU/Linux
  4. Getting Vim for Windows Environments
  5. Getting Vim for the Macintosh Environment
  6. Other Operating Systems
  7. Aids and Easy Modes for New Users
  8. Summary
2. Chapter 10 Major Vim Improvements over vi
  1. Built-in Help
  2. Startup and Initialization Options
  3. New Motion Commands
  4. Extended Regular Expressions
  5. Customizing the Executable
3. Chapter 11 Multiple Windows in Vim
  1. Initiating Multiwindow Editing
  2. Opening Windows
  3. Moving Around Windows (Getting Your Cursor from Here to There)
  4. Moving Windows Around
  5. Resizing Windows
  6. Buffers and Their Interaction with Windows
  7. Playing Tag with Windows
  8. Tabbed Editing
  9. Closing and Quitting Windows
  10. Summary
4. Chapter 12 Vim Scripts
  1. What’s Your Favorite Color (Scheme)?
  2. Dynamic File Type Configuration Through Scripting
  3. Some Additional Thoughts About Vim Scripting
  4. Resources
5. Chapter 13 Graphical Vim (gvim)
  1. General Introduction to gvim
  2. Customizing Scrollbars, Menus, and Toolbars
  3. gvim in Microsoft Windows
  4. gvim in the X Window System
  5. GUI Options and Command Synopsis
6. Chapter 14 Vim Enhancements for Programmers
  1. Folding and Outlining (Outline Mode)
  2. Auto and Smart Indenting
  3. Keyword and Dictionary Word Completion
  4. Tag Stacking
  5. Syntax Highlighting
  6. Compiling and Checking Errors with Vim
  7. Some Final Thoughts on Vim for Writing Programs
7. Chapter 15 Other Cool Stuff in Vim
  1. Editing Binary Files
  2. Digraphs: Non-ASCII Characters
  3. Editing Files in Other Places
  4. Navigating and Changing Directories
  5. Backups with Vim
  6. HTML Your Text
  7. What’s the Difference?
  8. Undoing Undos
  9. Now, Where Was I?
  10. What’s My Line (Size)?
  11. Abbreviations of Vim Commands and Options
  12. A Few Quickies (Not Necessarily Vim-Specific)
  13. More Resources
Other vi Clones
1. Chapter 16 nvi: New vi
  1. Author and History
  2. Important Command-Line Arguments
  3. Online Help and Other Documentation
  4. Initialization
  5. Multiwindow Editing
  6. GUI Interfaces
  7. Extended Regular Expressions
  8. Improvements for Editing
  9. Programming Assistance
  10. Interesting Features
  11. Sources and Supported Operating Systems
2. Chapter 17 Elvis
  1. Author and History
  2. Important Command-Line Arguments
  3. Online Help and Other Documentation
  4. Initialization
  5. Multiwindow Editing
  6. GUI Interfaces
  7. Extended Regular Expressions
  8. Improved Editing Facilities
  9. Programming Assistance
  10. Interesting Features
  11. elvis Futures
  12. Sources and Supported Operating Systems
3. Chapter 18 vile: vi Like Emacs
  1. Authors and History
  2. Important Command-Line Arguments
  3. Online Help and Other Documentation
  4. Initialization
  5. Multiwindow Editing
  6. GUI Interfaces
  7. Extended Regular Expressions
  8. Improved Editing Facilities
  9. Programming Assistance
  10. Interesting Features
  11. Sources and Supported Operating Systems
Appendixes
1. Appendix The vi, ex, and Vim Editors
  1. Command-Line Syntax
  2. Review of vi Operations
  3. vi Commands
  4. vi Configuration
  5. ex Basics
  6. Alphabetical Summary of ex Commands
2. Appendix Setting Options
  1. Solaris vi Options
  2. nvi 1.79 Options
  3. elvis 2.2 Options
  4. Vim 7.1 Options
  5. vile 9.6 Options
3. Appendix Problem Checklists
  1. Problems Opening Files
  2. Problems Saving Files
  3. Problems Getting to Visual Mode
  4. Problems with vi Commands
  5. Problems with Deletions
4. Appendix vi and the Internet
  1. Where to Start
  2. vi Web Sites
  3. A Different vi Clone
  4. Amaze Your Friends!
  5. Tastes Great, Less Filling
  6. vi Quotes

Colophon

Product Details

Title:

Learning the vi and Vim Editors, Seventh Edition

By:

Arnold Robbins, Elbert Hannah, Linda Lamb

Publisher:

O'Reilly Media

Formats:

Print
Ebook
Safari Books Online

Print Release:

July 2008

Ebook Release:

June 2009

Pages:

496

Print ISBN:

978-0-596-52983-3

| ISBN 10:

0-596-52983-X

Ebook ISBN:

978-0-596-15935-1

| ISBN 10:

0-596-15935-8

Customer Reviews

About the Authors

Arnold Robbins

Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has been working with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. His experience also includes multiple commercial Unix systems, from Sun, IBM, HP and DEC. He has been working with GNU/Linux systems since 1996. He likes his Macintosh laptop, but it has been commandeered by one of his daughters.

Arnold has also been a heavy awk user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of awk. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for awk. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation.

O'Reilly has been keeping him busy: He is author and/or coauthor of the bestselling titles: Unix In A Nutshell, Effective awk Programming, sed & awk, Classic Shell Scripting, and several pocket references.

View Arnold Robbins's full profile page.
Elbert Hannah

Elbert is a professional software engineer and software architect recently finishing a 21-year career in the telcom industry. He wrote a full screen editor in assembler in 1983 as his first professional assignment, and has had special interest in editors since. He loves connecting Unix to anything and once wrote a stream editor program to automate JCL edits for mainframe monthly configurations by streaming mainframe JCL to a stream editor on an RJE connected Unix box.

He loves tinkering with everything Unix and considers any environment incomplete without his suite of Unix work-alike tools and the latest version of vim. He is a Unix Shell specialist, writing entire applications with only the shell.

His telcom honored him with their highest award for money-saving applications that he authored using a set of mainframe screen-scraping tools he wrote himself. They continue to use those applications today. He was also one of three founding team members that brought web 1.0 to the corporate consciousness in his telco position, and his team featured on the cover of CIO Magazine for their innovative and pioneering works.

He also served a brief stint on the original Microsoft NT beta support team in 1992.

He loves bicycling, music, and reading. Today he lives in the Chicago area where he occasionally takes on short term projects and works on personal software products.

View Elbert Hannah's full profile page.
Linda Lamb

Linda Lamb is a former employee of O'Reilly Media, where she worked in various capacities, including technical writer, editor of technical books, and marketing manager. She also worked on O'Reilly's series of consumer health books, Patient Centered Guides.

View Linda Lamb's full profile page.

Colophon

The animal on the cover of Learning the vi and Vim Editors, Seventh Edition, is a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur. Its generic name, Tarsius, is derived from the animal's very long ankle bone, the tarsus. The tarsier is a native of the East Indies jungles from Sumatra to the Philippines and Sulawesi, where it lives in the trees, leaping from branch to branch with extreme agility and speed.

A small animal, the tarsier's body is only 6 inches long, followed by a 10-inch tufted tail. It is covered in soft, brown or gray silky fur, and has a round face and huge eyes. Its arms and legs are long and slender, as are its digits, which are tipped with rounded, fleshy pads to improve its grip on trees. Tarsiers are active only at night, hiding during the day in tangles of vines or in the tops of tall trees. They subsist mainly on insects and, though very curious animals, tend to be loners.

The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover font is Adobe's ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka, the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed, and the code font is LucasFont's TheSansMonoCondensed.

O'Reilly Books & Videos

Learning the vi and Vim Editors, Seventh Edition

Text processing at maximum speed and power

Basic and Advanced vi

Chapter 1 The vi Text Editor

Chapter 2 Simple Editing

Chapter 3 Moving Around in a Hurry

Chapter 4 Beyond the Basics

Chapter 5 Introducing the ex Editor

Chapter 6 Global Replacement

Chapter 7 Advanced Editing

Chapter 8 Introduction to the vi Clones

Vim

Chapter 9 Vim (vi Improved): An Introduction

Chapter 10 Major Vim Improvements over vi

Chapter 11 Multiple Windows in Vim

Chapter 12 Vim Scripts

Chapter 13 Graphical Vim (gvim)

Chapter 14 Vim Enhancements for Programmers

Chapter 15 Other Cool Stuff in Vim

Other vi Clones

Chapter 16 nvi: New vi

Chapter 17 Elvis

Chapter 18 vile: vi Like Emacs

Appendixes

Appendix The vi, ex, and Vim Editors

Appendix Setting Options

Appendix Problem Checklists

Appendix vi and the Internet

Colophon

Arnold Robbins

Elbert Hannah

Linda Lamb