1. Basic and Advanced vi

   1. Chapter 1 The vi Text Editor

      1. Opening and Closing Files
      2. 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

2. Extensions and Clones

   1. Chapter 8 vi Clones Feature Summary

      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. A Look Ahead

   2. Chapter 9 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

   3. Chapter 10 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

   4. Chapter 11 vim—vi Improved

      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. Sources and Supported Operating Systems

   5. Chapter 12 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

3. Appendixes

   1. Appendix A Quick Reference

   2. Appendix B ex Commands

      1. Command Syntax
      2. Alphabetical List of Commands

   3. Appendix C Setting Options

      1. Solaris 2.6 vi Options
      2. nvi 1.79 Options
      3. elvis 2.0 Options
      4. vim 5.1 Options
      5. vile 8.0 Options

   4. Appendix D 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

   5. Appendix E vi and the Internet

      1. vi Web Sites
      2. Amaze Your Friends!
      3. Tastes Great, Less Filling
      4. vi Quotes

1. Colophon

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal featured on the cover of Learning the vi Editor 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 six inches long, followed by a ten inch tufted tail. It is covered in soft, brown or grey silky fur, 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 the tarsier's 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. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.32 using the ITC Garamond font.

Whenever possible, our books use RepKover™, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKovers™ limit, perfect binding is used. The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and implemented in troff by Lenny Muellner. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The screen shots that appear in the book were created in Adobe Photoshop 4 and the illustrations were created in Macromedia Freehand 7.0 by Robert Romano.