Anybody venturing *nix can find this article useful. Author's sense of humor surely grabs the readers attention. Good Job.
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I have been using for vi for about 3 months now.. and it rocks. But I would really like a tutorial on the real power of vi like: regexp matching/replacing and howto have vi automagically indent your C code. Good basic article please have a vi >201 guide :)
And here I always thought Vi was just a limited feature EMACS mode. ;)
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JDR
Excellent article!
Presented in the right way, form, and fun this article should be a start for everyone coming into the wonderful world of vi and also perhaps for those already there.
A "bravo" for the author!
Regards,
Alesh
Good article - Thanks!
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I have another resource available for vi:
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a quick crash course for vi.
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www.arekdreyer.com/help/vi.html
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And it stinks. It's VI and its sclerotized lovers who are responsible for the deep-rooted prejudice, that *NIX is for
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geeks only. This isn't the only reason for
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the bitter fact, that this technically superior operating system is beaten by windos, but definitely one of them. The best ever VI tutorial for psycologically healthy users I saw in one of the bioinformatics manuals: "We don't recommend you to use VI. On some systems, however, you may accidentally invoke it. In this case, do the following combination of keys: <ctl-c>:q! or ask for assistance."
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This isn't anything like Ferrari. Look around - how many sexy long-legged girls do you see or have you ever seen in your life typing something in VI? Approximetely as many as you can pick up riding a broomstick along a dusty road. You may not be interested in girls, beeng happy with VI or edlin or puncher and beer, but you can't reproduce without them. Software, like Unix and it's principal text editor is also doomed unless a sufficient number of normal users can use it. Girl's choice is a good indicator.
Man I could not agree with you more.
And a whole lot more intuitive. Pico is even better but from what I understand it is not GPL'ed and as such has distribution problems.
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vi (actually vim) runs about 500K while aee is about 175K (at least on my SuSE 6.2 system).
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A console-based editor is necessary, especially on a recovery floppy, but I think aee is a better choice due to size and ease-of-use issues. The fact that vi has always come with Unix is irrelevant today since most people trying Linux and the other Unix-clones have never used a Unix system and probably never will.
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Those who like vi can always get it if it isn't included in a distro.
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Vi 101 (http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Administration/Vi-101) It's free! Is it really? My time isn't that cheap!
After using real code editors to program in C, C++, Delphi, Javascript, etc. I've considered the money well spent! Extended console editors, no matter how they are dressed up, can't match the ease of use or customization, the color syntax highlighting,the macros, regexps, grep, etc. Who has time to learn the arcane and awkward keystrokes of dino technology. Your end users could not care less what editor you use (that is, until you do a search and replace with regexps that craps your code with a subtle bug.) You can read the article here (http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Administration/Vi-101).
vi is a powerful editor but there is an even more powerful one which is vi compatible but allows things such as unlimited undo, syntax coloring, split windows, visual selection, gui support, and much much more.
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Have a look at http://www.vim.org
Yup.. Did you read the article? It's actually all about vim. Some of the commands are not included with regular vi.
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Watch for more soon!
Here's a tip: You use your bloated Emacs piece of crap, and let me have my vi. Just because vi is hard to LEARN doesn't mean it's hard to USE. In fact, I find vim to be the most user-friendly text editor around. Why? Because it's easy for ME to use it. It's an editor with excellent syntax highlighting and tons of features, yet doesn't take 15 minutes to start up, and I can use it easily on the term or through an ssh session. It basically rules. How many other editors do you know of where you can change the capitalization of a letter with one keystroke? Now that's power.
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Unix is all about choice. To each his own. I won't deny you your emacs (or whatever you use), but make sure you leave my vi alone.
When I was a student in CS some years ago, our first computer introduction was infront of some old SUN-machines and a short crash-course in VI. I hated the damn thing for being totally uncomprehensable. Used EMACS for all my C-programming and other editors for everything else the following years. A couple of weeks ago I was forced to use VIM on a server here at work for web-devlopment in Perl. After the initial hour of frustration and angst I finally got into it, found a relatively good reference (the internal documentation sucks...) and it's been all VIM since then! It's a great and above all *fast* editor. It's made me a lot more productive and i find more and more useful functionality the more I use it.
I think that the added cursor-commands in insertmode of VIM makes a world of difference in usability as opposed to VI. That was what really got me the first time around. You had to tap the ESC-key for every little thing you wanted to do!
Amen brother!<br>
Tis obvious the original posters maintain fantasies of fornicating with dead monkeys, and spewed their rather well used garbage in a fit of post-coital genius. Well, as close as they can come, anyway.<br>
vi, once you get used to it, makes all other editors look like a 12 year old's first gwbasic proggie. I'm constantly finding myself hitting ESC in my current bloated email client, and then pondering why it doesn't work. I'd say vi is more addictive then fellatio, but I was unable to contact Mr. Clinton prior to typing this and ask him whether he used vi or not. Probably not.<br>
Oh, the point? The little gui wussies who like playing with things and don't mind taking their hands off the keyboard do just fine with bloatware editors. For anyone with half a brain, and the need to do something more with their computer then check their AOLame s-mail, it's vi all the way!<br>
(No dead monkey's were anally abused in the making of this highly opiniated rant. Carry on, carry on...)
I couldn't agree more.
"The most powerful text editor for *NIX"??? Would that make ED the next runner up?
I've got nothing against Vi, it's fast and small, two things that go a long way in my book. But to say it is the ferrari of text editors, come one!
At a minimum you do your readers a disservice by failing to acknowledge EMACS as a powerful, highly extensible, and worthy alternative to Vi.
We all have our personal preferences and if you prefer Vi, then great. But your tone is a bit too definitive for my tastes.
I remember the g functionality for search and destroy missions as standing for "global"<br>
You didn't mention another handy command,
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<p><pre><font color=#008000><xmp>!!an OS command</xmp></font></pre><p>
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to put a command's output into the current document
and
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<p><pre><font color=#008000><xmp>ZZ</xmp></font></pre><p>
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to exit in a hurry with a save...
emacs is arguably more powerful than vi,
though I usually use vi, as I have to work
on so many different *nix machines, I'm sure that it is there, and vi always works.... and it's usuable over a slow telnet connection...
but emacs has quite a nice ability to write extensions in lisp, etc... just ask any cs dropout... er cs grad...
I couldn't agree more... I'd also like to learn how to alter the section delimiters, something that I haven't been able to find in ANY of the documentation.
An excellent tutorial! I look forward to more.
I think some readers don't understand the implications of calling vi a Ferrari. The name doesn't imply luxury or convenience: it implies performance in the hands of an expert driver. I've seen a UNIX programmer write code in vi so fast I couldn't keep track of what he was doing; lines were magically repeated, the cursor jumping to just the place where it needed to be to change the next word, creating a virtual symphony of intelligent thought.
As the salesman said, "Maybe a Ferrari is too much car for you. Can I interest you in something with an automatic transmission?"
vi was invented by the folks who invented UNIX. nuff said.
% is a shortcut for 1,$
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Example:
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%s/foo/bar/ is equivalent to 1,$s/foo/bar/
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Also, when editing multiple files, you can use :previous in addition to :next
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- Matt