Learning the vi and Vim Editors

772 Pages·2021·10.901 MB·English

by  Arnold Robbins, Elbert Hannah

Learning the vi and Vim Editors
EIGHTH EDITION
Power and Agility Beyond Just Text Editing
With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the
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Arnold Robbins and Elbert Hannah
Learning the vi and Vim Editors
by Arnold Robbins and Elbert Hannah
Copyright © 2022 Elbert Hannah and Arnold Robbins. All rights reserved.
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July 2008: Seventh Edition
November 2021: Eighth Edition
Revision History for the Early Release
2020-08-06: First Release
2020-09-17: Second Release
2020-11-17: Third Release
2021-01-25: Fourth Release
2021-04-30: Fifth Release
2021-07-28: Sixth Release
2021-10-01: Seventh Release
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978-1-492-07873-9
Dedication
To my wife, Miriam, for your love, patience, and support.
—Arnold Robbins, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Editions

To my wife, Anna, for your love, encouragement, and patience. Thank you
for being there.
—Elbert Hannah, Seventh and Eighth Editions
Preface
A NOTE FOR EARLY RELEASE READERS
With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the
authors’ raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take
advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these
titles.
If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or
examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this
chapter, please reach out to the author at
[email protected].
Text editing is one of the most common tasks on any computer system, and
vi is one of the most useful standard text editors on a system. With vi you
can create new files or edit any existing text-only file.
vi, like many of the classic utilities developed during the early years of
Unix®, has a reputation for being hard to navigate. Bram Moolenaar’s
enhanced clone, Vim (“vi Improved”), has gone a long way toward
removing reasons for such impressions. Vim includes countless
conveniences, visual guides, and help screens.
Today, Vim is the the most popular version of vi, so this eighth edition
focuses on Vim as follows:
Part I, vi and Vim Fundamentals, teaches basic vi skills,
applicable to all versions of vi, but it does so in the context of
Vim.
Part II, Vim, devotes a number of chapters specifically to Vim’s
advanced features.
Part III, Vim In The Larger Milieu, presents chapters relating to
Vim in a larger context.
Scope of This Book
This book consists of 17 chapters and four appendixes, divided into four
parts. Part I, vi and Vim Fundamentals, is designed to get you started using
vi and Vim quickly, and to follow up with advanced skills that will let you
use them effectively.
The first two chapters, Chapter 1, Introducing vi and Vim, and Chapter 2,
Simple Editing, present some simple editing 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 operations.
But the editors are 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, Moving Around in a Hurry, and
Chapter 4, Beyond the Basics, concentrate on easier ways to do tasks.
During your first reading, you’ll get at least an idea of what vi and Vim
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, Introducing the ex Editor, Chapter 6, Global Replacement, and
Chapter 7, Advanced Editing, 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 Vim, and they show you how to issue ex commands
from within vi and Vim.
Part II, Vim, describes Vim, the most popular vi clone 21 years into the
21st century. It goes into detail on the many (many!) features Vim has over
the original vi.
Chapter 8, Vim (vi Improved): Overview and Improvements Over vi,
provides a general introduction to Vim. The chapter also gives an overview
of the major improvements in Vim over vi, such as built-in help, control
over initialization, additional motion commands, extended regular
expressions, and many more.
Chapter 9, Graphical Vim (gvim), looks at Vim in modern GUI
environments, such as those that are now standard on commercial Unix
systems, GNU/Linux and other Unix work-alikes, and MS-Windows.
Chapter 10, Multiple Windows in Vim, focuses on multiwindow editing,
which is perhaps the most significant additional feature over standard vi.
This chapter provides all the details on creating and using multiple
windows.
Chapter 11, Vim Enhancements for Programmers, focuses on Vim’s use as a
programmer’s editor, above and beyond its facilities for general text editing.
Of particular value are the folding and outlining facilities, smart indenting,
syntax highlighting, and edit-compile-debug cycle speedups.
Chapter 12, Vim Scripts, looks into the Vim command language, which lets
you write scripts to customize and tailor Vim to suit your needs. Much of
Vim’s ease of use “out of the box” comes from the large number of scripts
that other users have already written and contributed to the Vim
distribution.
Chapter 13, Other Cool Stuff in Vim, is a bit of a catch-all chapter, covering
a number of interesting points that don’t fit into the earlier chapters.
Chapter 14, Some Vim Power Techniques, presents some useful “power
techniques”. Based around the idea of personal key remappings, it shows
you more ways to be productive.
Part III, Vim In The Larger Milieu, looks at vi’s and Vim’s roles in the
larger software development and computer usage worlds.
Chapter 15, Vim as IDE: Some Assembly Required, touches the tip of the
iceberg of the world of Vim plugins, focusing on how you can change from
Vim from “just” an editor into a full-fledged Integrated Development
Environment (IDE).
Chapter 16, vi is Everywhere, looks at other significant software
environments where vi-style editing can be brought into play in order to
increase productivity.
Chapter 17, Epilogue, provides a brief summary to round things off.
Part IV, Appendixes, provides useful reference material.
Appendix A, The vi, ex, and Vim Editors, lists all standard vi and ex
commands, sorted by function. It also provides an alphabetical list of ex
commands. Selected vi and ex commands from Vim are also included.
Appendix B, Setting Options, lists set command options for vi and for
Vim.
Appendix C, The Lighter Side of vi, presents some humorous material
related to vi.
Appendix D, vi and Vim: Source Code and Building, describes where to get
the “Heirloom” vi, as well as how to get Vim for your Unix, GNU/Linux,
MS-Windows or Macintosh system.
How the Material Is Presented
Our philosophy is to give you a good overview of what we feel are vi and
Vim survival materials for the new user. Learning a new editor, especially
an editor with all the options of Vim, can seem like an overwhelming task.
We have made an effort to present basic concepts and commands in an
easy-to-read and logical manner.
After providing the basics for vi and Vim, which are usable everywhere,
we move on to cover Vim in depth. The following sections describe the
conventions used in this book.
Discussion of vi Commands
For each keyboard command or group of related commands, you will find a
brief introduction to the main concept before it is broken down into task-
oriented sections. We then present the appropriate command to use in each
case, along with a description of the command and the proper syntax for
using it.
Conventions
In syntax descriptions and examples, what you would actually type is
shown in the Constant Width font, as are all command names and
program options. Variables (which you would not type literally, but would
replace with an actual value when you type the command) are shown in
Constant Width italic. Brackets indicate that a variable is
optional. For example, in the syntax line:
vi [filename]
filename would be replaced by an actual filename. The brackets indicate
that the vi command can be invoked without specifying a filename at all.
The brackets themselves are not typed.
Certain examples show the effect of commands typed at the shell prompt. In
such examples, what you actually type is shown in Constant Width
Bold, to distinguish it from the system response. For example:
$ ls
ch01.xml ch02.xml ch03.xml ch04.xml
In code examples, italic indicates a comment that is not to be typed. In the
text, italic refers to filenames, introduces special terms, and emphasizes
anything that needs emphasis.
Following traditional Unix documentation convention, references of the
form printf(3) refer to the online manual (accessed via the man command).
This example refers to the entry for the printf() function in section 3 of
the manual. You would type man -s 3 printf on most systems to see
it.