Archive-name: editor-faq/vi Posting-Frequency: 2nd and 17th of every month Last-modified: 2001-01-23 Version: 1.85 vi editor FAQ ------------- 0.0 - Introduction -- How do I use this FAQ? This document is broken into multiple sections. First, a general introduction and discussion of what vi is in sections 0 and 1. Section 2 is a collection of "novice" questions, questions that someone without much experience with vi might ask. These include the differences between command and insert mode, and continue ending with questions such as "How do I cut and paste?" Then, section 3 is geared toward the intermediate vi user. Starting with "How do I do a search and replace," and continuing onward from there, until it finally ends with a discussion of vi macros. Also included is a vi quick reference. This should give a canonical list of vi commands. Next, is a list of :set commands, all of which can be put into a .exrc file to customize your editing environment. The quick reference was confirmed on a machine running SunOS with the System V distribution of vi. Each command should work under System V and UCB versions of vi other than the one shipped with SunOS, but I have not personally confirmed this. Unless otherwise specified this document assumes that you are in command mode. An attempt was made to retain much of the terminology used in the original vi documentation, wherever I could remember what it was. Also, I will often refer to regular expressions (often called regex's). Please look at the man page (man 5 regexp will show it on most Unix programs) or another reference (the O'Reilly Mastering Regular Expressions book in the bibliography, for example) for more information on what they are and what they do. They're really useful, and it won't be a waste of time. Trust me. 0.1 - Index First File: 0.0 - Introduction -- How do I use this FAQ? 0.1 - Index 0.2 - Can I distribute this FAQ? 0.3 - What can you do to help out with this faq? 0.4 - Where can I read this FAQ in other languages? 1.0 - What is vi? 1.1 - What is the big deal about vi? Why does anyone use it? More importantly, why should *I* use it? 1.2 - Wow! This sounds great! Is there any reason not to use vi? 1.3 - What different operating systems is vi available for? 1.4 - Okay, you've convinced me. I'm going to learn vi. Where do I start? 1.5 - What are some of the vi clones that are available? 2.0 - Learning vi. 2.1 - What games will help me learn vi? 2.2 - What is the difference between Command mode & Insert mode? 2.3 - Wait, my keyboard doesn't have a key! What should I do? 2.4 - What are all of those ~s? 2.5 - I can't get used to using hjkl, do you have any suggestions? 2.6 - How do I quit without saving? 2.7 - How do I insert a file? 2.8 - How do I search for text? 2.9 - How do I search for a control sequence? 2.10 - How do I reformat text? 2.11 - How do I copy text? 2.12 - Ahhhh!!! I just hit dG and lost my dissertation! What can I do? (Or, I've just made a mistake, what should I do?) 2.13 - vi appears to be frozen or acting strange, what can I do? (Also, I can't get rid of the colon prompt, now what?) 2.14 - I've just written my dissertation and have been told that I need to have each section in a different file, what should I do? 2.15 - What's the deal with all of these : commands? 2.16 - Argh! vi has gone crazy! None of the commands work! Now what? 3.0 - How do you do a search and replace? 3.1 - My / key is broken! How can I search and replace? 3.2 - How do I run a program from within vi? 3.3 - Ahhh!! I was writing my dissertation, and the computer crashed! 3.4 - Any tips for making vi programmer friendly? 3.5 - Macros -- How do I write them? 3.6 - How do I make a function key a Macro? 3.7 - Is there anyway to abbreviate text? 3.8 - How do I spell check the current document? 3.9 - How do I get rid the ^M's at the end of each line of my file? How do I make a macro to do it? 3.10 - I've got a hardcopy terminal, can I still use vi? 3.11 - Oh, okay, is THAT what open mode is? But I don't have a hardcopy terminal, and it still starts in open mode! 3.12 - How can I get the source code to vi? 4.0 - More advanced topics in vi 4.1 - I see that sections are defined by SHNHH HU and paragraphs by IPLPPPQPPLIbp by default? What language is that in? What in the world does it mean? 4.2 - But when I program, I've noticed that I can use ]] and [[ to move between functions. My functions don't have .SH or anything at the beginning, what gives? 4.3 - How do I work with multiple files at the same time? 4.4 - So, I've started up vi, but now I want to be able to edit another file. How do I do this? 4.5 - How can I get back to the first file, though? 4.6 - But I'm only wanting to edit one file at a time. I've got one open and I want to switch permenatly to another file. How do I do that? 4.7 - How do I add another file into the middle of my current file? Second File: 5.0 - What's online at the vi archives? 6.0 - Silly vi tricks, and silly macros 6.1 - Silly vi tricks 6.2 - Silly macros 7.0 - Alphabetical vi quick reference 7.1 - Command mode input options ( : commands) 7.2 - set options 8.0 - Setting up .exrc file 8.1 - Sample .exrc file 9.0 - Bugs in vi 10.0 - Glossary of terms 11.0 - Bibliography of Books that cover vi 0.2 - Can I distribute this FAQ? Yes, as long as you do not alter it in any fashion, or charge any money for it. If you plan on including it in a book, CDRom, or other such publication, please contact me first. 0.3 - What can you do to help out with this faq? First, send me any errors that you may find. Also, any suggestions that you might have are also appreciated. Better yet, anything that you think is unclear. My email address is: ellidz@eridu.uchicago.edu Also, use vi! Spread the word! I'm sorry I can't list everyone who has contributed to this faq, as many, many people have given me advice and helped out, but I fear if I were to, the list of contributers would become as long as the document itself. 0.4 - Where can I read this FAQ in other languages? [Note: I've lost my list of other people's translations, if you've translated the FAQ to another language and your translation is not listed here, please let me know. ] Marc Simon (msimon@astrolabe.frmug.org) has translated the FAQ into French. It is available at: . If you're interested in translating the FAQ into another lanugage, let me know, I'm always happy to have it be more widely available. If you let me know before you start working on it I can make sure you're not duplicating someone else's efforts. 1.0 - What is vi? vi is a Visual Editor (hence the name -- vi for VIsual). What is a visual editor (as opposed to a non-visual one)? Visual editors are ones that let you see multiple lines of the document that you are editing as you edit it. This seems pretty common in most editors today, so the idea of a non-visual editor is a little strange. Examples of non-visual editors are sed, ex, ed, and edlin (the last one being the editor shipped with DOS until relatively recently.) vi was written by William Joy as part of the bsd distribution of Unix. It was later used by AT&T, and has been standard Unix since. 1.1 - What is the big deal about vi? Why does anyone use it? More importantly, why should *I* use it? vi is default visual editor under Unix, and is therefore shipped with all recent versions of Unix. (Recent being defined as post 1984 or so.) This means that whenever you run across a machine that is running a Unix of some sort, you will know that you have a powerful editor at your finger tips. Why else? vi is a powerful editor. Also, once you know vi, you can edit files really quickly, as it is extremely economical with the keystrokes. Due to its different modes for inserting and issuing commands, it is much faster than most non-mode based editors. It is also a very small editor. (The version on my machine is 200k) Also, it can do almost anything, as long as you know how to get it to do what you want. Furthermore, as an editor it allows a lot of interaction with the Unix operating system. It allows you to use many of the powerful Unix utilities from within vi. It's possible to, from within vi, kill off a list of specific processes that you want to kill. If you haven't given yourself permision to write to the file you're editing by accident, you can change the permision without leaving vi. vi works by having commands that work on objects. By learning only a few commands and a few objects you can learn how to do a lot of things, simply by combining the commands and the objects. Even the commands are seperated into subcategories. For example, the movement commands and the modification commands are different. If you know that d is the command to delete, and j is the command to go down a line, and you know how to combine them (dj), you can delete down one line. When you use numbers it gets even more powerful. d5j will delete 5 lines below you. Then, once you learn the character for "paragraph" (}), you already know how to delete 5 paragraphs. 1.2 - Wow! This sounds great! Is there any reason not to use vi? Yes. There is a very good reason. It can be somewhat hard to learn, and until you do so, it will be slow and painful. Once you learn it, it will be faster, but the process of learning it is slow. I've been asked if vi was an easy editor to learn, whether it was intuitive or not. My general response to this question is: "Yes, some of us think so. But most people think that we are crazy." 1.3 - What different operating systems is vi available for? Unix. That's it. (Well, technically, the 4.3BSD version included support for VMS as well.) However, there are many, many clones of vi that are available for different operating systems. I personally have used vi clones under: Unix, Dos, OS/2, Mac System 7. (See below for a list of specifics.) 1.4 - Okay, you've convinced me. I'm going to learn vi. Where do I start? Well... That's a tricky one. There are many good books out there that cover vi; most books on Unix have at least one chapter devoted to it. There are also many books devoted specifically to vi. I don't have any preference, so your best bet might be to ask your local vi guru where they learned. Also, play around. Fire up vi with a non-important document (your dissertation is NOT a good document to learn vi with...) and play around. I can't imagine anyone learning vi without playing around with it quite a bit. Remember, if you get confused, just hit the Escape key a couple of times, and you'll be in command mode again. I should mention at some point, and I guess here is as good a place as any, that people who think they might want to do Unix system administration, or any type of configuration of Unix machines will probably also want to learn ed or ex, as some versions of Unix do not put vi in the root partition, and one might be stranded without it at some point. Ed is a good choice. 1.5 - What are some of the vi clones that are available? Just to list a few: STvi (STevie), elvis, vile, vim, and nvi, xvi. elvis is available for: Amiga, DOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Atari, Psion3a Handheld. Stratus machines running VOS can get elvis at: ftp://ftp.stratus.com/pub/vos/tools/tools.html Lemmy is available for Win95/NT at: http://www.accessone.com/~jai nvi is the vi that ships with BSD 4.4. STevie is available for: Atari ST, DOS, Unix, Macintosh. MacOS is available at any info-mac mirror in /info-mac/text (Such as ftp://ftp.hawaii.edu/pub/mac/info-mac/text) Stratus machines running VOS can get STevie at: ftp://ftp.stratus.com/pub/vos/tools/tools.html vile is available for: BeOS, DOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Window95, WindowsNT The source is available at: http://dickey.his.com/vile/vile.html. xvile, a X-windows aware version of vile exists, as well. Vim is available for: AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, BeOS, DOS, MacOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Windows General information, documentation and much more about Vim is on http://www.vim.org/ The Vim Pages A list of sites which mirror Vim is available at: http://www.vim.org/dist.html Vim Distribution Page There are three mailing list for Vim: "VIM announcements list" vim-announce@vim.org "VIM help mailing list" vim@vim.org "VIM development list" vim-dev@vim.org Information on subscription is on page http://www.vim.org/mail.html viper is available for GNU Emacs. ftp://ftp.cs.sunysb.edu/pub/TechReports/kifer/viper.tar.Z xvi is available for: DOS, Unix. Mortice Kern Systems (support@mks.com), who I have absolutely no affiliation with, offers a commercial version of vi for DOS/Windows, OS/2, and WindowsNT. It is included as part of the MKS Toolkit (a set of Unix-like tools for Windows) and cannot be purchased seperately. There are some differences between the different vi clones. Many offer improvements, but most still allow the commands that are listed in this document, but there may be some differences. Refer to the documentation that comes with the clone for details. 2.0 - Learning vi. These are some basic hints for the novice vi user. First, keep a command summary with you at all times. A quick reference guide/command summary is included later on. Second, get a good book that covers vi. This document is not the best way to learn it (at least not yet.) I'm not sure if this document should teach people to to use vi from scratch, as there are many good books on it already. However, there are hints here. As for choosing a book, the standard rules apply: look at it before buying it. See if any of it makes sense to you. Make sure that it has exercises that you can practice with. Compare it with other books -- after all, vi can be very confusing, and you want to make sure that it is the book that is confusing, and not just that you underestimated the difficulty of learning vi. Also, seek out vilearn or vitutor, programs designed to teach you the basics of vi. 2.1 - What games will help me learn vi? This may seem a bit silly, but there are many games on Unix systems that can help you learn to use vi. These help particularly with the basics. Although I don't know of any games that help with every vi command, I do know of a few that will help you learn to use hjkl to move the cursor around. NetHack, a rogue-like game, is particularly good for this, as it is a large game and can be entertaining for quite some time. Nethack is available from ftp.uu.net in /pub/games/nethack. Not to make the other games sound worse, but some other ones are: rogue, moria, omega, worm, and snake. 2.2 - What is the difference between Command mode & Insert mode? Often cited as one of the main problems with vi, and equally often cited as being one of its best strengths, vi differentiates between a "Command mode" and an "Insert mode." Understanding this difference is VITAL to learning vi. When one starts vi it starts in command mode. In this mode, one can move around the file, and issue commands to change certain areas of the text, cut, copy and paste sections of the text and do much more. Insert mode is where one can actually insert text. In other words, command mode is used to move around the document, and insert mode is used to type text into the document. Commands such as: a, i, c, C, O, o and others will switch one from command mode to insert mode. or will take one out of insert mode and return one to command mode. Get used to this distinction. It is one of the things that makes vi different from most other editors. It also allows one to do a lot of things without taking one's hands from the standard keyboard position. For novices it is often nice to know what mode you are in. If you type: "echo set showmode >> $HOME/.exrc" at the Unix command line, it will make is so that each time vi is started it will default to showing the mode on the bottom right of the screen. (To understand what this is doing, see the sections on "setting up a .exrc" and the "set options.") If it does not show anything in the bottom right, it means that you are in command mode. I call a few different modes (append, open and insert) "insert mode" in this document. 2.3 - Wait, my keyboard doesn't have a key! What should I do? Try hitting instead. If your keyboard has a key, try that. If you don't have a key, many keyboards use , , or as a key (however, if you've got any of those keys, you almost certainly have an key). If neither of these work, try . Some DEC terminals use the F11 key as escape. 2.4 - What are all of those ~s? They're just there to let you know where the bottom of your file is, they are not actually in your document, and you do not need to worry about them. 2.5 - I can't get used to using hjkl, do you have any suggestions? First, if your terminal is set properly and you have a good connection, you should be able to use the arrow keys. However, if you think that you will be using vi a lot, then it makes sense to learn hjkl, as they are faster to type. Also, there are occasions where you may have a bad connection and the ESC sequences may get lost. Here is a simple mnemonic to help remember this: j extends below the line, and k above the line when written by hand. 2.6 - How do I quit without saving? :q! will do it. 2.7 - How do I insert a file? :r For example, to insert the file /etc/motd, type: :r /etc/motd This will insert the file at the current location in the file you are working on. If you specify a number before the r, it will insert it at that location in the file. 2.8 - How do I search for text? / will search forward. ? will search backwards. ?? or // will repeat the last search. It is worth noting that these are pretty much standard in Unix. In addition, in vi, n will repeat the last search in the same direction as the original search. N will repeat the last search pattern in the opposite direction of the original search. For example /foo will find the next occurence of "foo" from where you are. n will find the one after that. N will take you to the first occurence. Hitting N a second time will get the same result as ?foo would have in the first place. Regular Expressions may be used within searches. 2.9 - How do I search for a control sequence? /> will tell vi to take the next character literally, and not to take it as a command. 2.10 - How do I reformat text? If your computer has the program fmt on it, all you need to do is type !}fmt from command mode (without a : before it). This will reformat the text from the current location until the end of the paragraph. If your machine does not have fmt, you need to find a similar program. (I gather there are many such programs available from the public domain, but I do not know much about them.) You may also want to look into par. Par is similar to fmt in function, but has more feature. Par can be downloaded from: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~amc/Par. 2.11 - How do I copy text? Okay, this might be a bit complicated. Take from this section what you can, and reread it a few times. Also, experiment. "yy will copy one line of text into register . (A register is vi-lingo for a place to store data that was cut or copied.) must be between a and z. "dd will delete one line and place it in register . You may use a number before the yy or dd to specify the number of lines. Using an uppercase will append the text into the register leaving what was there before. "p will put the text after the cursor. "P will put it before the cursor. If the register contains the beginning or end of a line, the line will be placed on another line as appropriate. Y may be used as a short cut for yy. In addition, y$, yH, yM, etc. are valid, as are the equivalent d commands. For quick cuts and pastes, no register need be specified. In this case, no appending is allowed, and the register will be removed if another delete command is given. (Including x). For example, to move the previous paragraph, one would go to the top of the paragraph, type "a13dd, move to the position in which one wishes to put the paragraph, and then type "ap to put it below the current line. Now, presumably you want to be able to cut and paste into areas that are not just the end of the line. In order to do this, use m to mark an area. This letter may be the same as a cut/copy register, they are stored in different area of memory. Then, type "[y or d]`. Where is the register to put the text into, is the letter used to mark, and y or d as appropriate. 2.12 - Ahhhh!!! I just hit dG and lost my dissertation! What can I do? (Or, I've just made a mistake, what should I do?) u will undo the last command. U will undo changes to the current line. (Granted, a one line dissertation would not be much.) :e! will reload the current document without saving any changes. In addition, deleted text gets stored in the registers numbered from 1 to 9. "p will put the last nth deletion. You can quickly search the registers by trying one, hitting u, and trying the next. (In order to expedite this, vi uses . slightly differently than normal. Instead of repeating the last command, it will try the next register, so all you need to do is: "1p u . u ., etc. until you undo the delete you want to undo.) 2.13 - vi appears to be frozen or acting strange, what can I do? (Also, I can't get rid of the colon prompt, now what?) If vi appears to have frozen, make sure that you haven't hit by mistake. In order to undo a , hit . If there is a colon and you can't get rid of it, you've entered ex by accident. Generally this happens by hitting "Q" from command mode. Just type vi to get back into vi. 2.14 - I've just written my dissertation and have been told that I need to have each section in a different file, what should I do? :[m],[n]w will save between lines m and n to . This line numbering method works for almost every : command. If you use :[m],[n]w >> it will append it to the file. 2.15 - What's the deal with all of these : commands? The commands that follow a : are commands from the ex editor. These allow a lot of flexibility and power. For example, there are many different ways to search and replace, all of with have some similarities (in fact, they are in some ways the same...) 2.16 - Argh! vi has gone crazy! None of the commands work! Now what? The most common time for vi to act insane when it comes to typing is when the caps lock key has accidentally been hit. Many keyboards on Unix servers have caps lock and control in the opposite position from many PCs, causing people to occassionally hit it. Just for fun, try navigating in vi with the caps lock on sometime. 3.0 - How do you do a search and replace? Well, there are a few methods. The simplest is: :s/old/new/g But, this only does it on the current line... So: :%s/old/new/g In general: :[range]s/old/new/[cgi] Where [range] is any line range, including line numbers, $ (end of file), . (current location), % (current file), or just two numbers with a comma or semicolon between them. (Or even: .,+5 to mean the next five lines). [cgi] is either c, g, i, or nothing. c tells vi to prompt you before the changes, g to change all of the occurrences on a line. (type yes to tell vi to change it.) i tells vi to be case insensitive on the search. The g after the last slash tells it to replace more than just the first occurrence on each line. Another method is: :g/foobar/s/bar/baz/g This searches for foobar, and changes it to foobaz. It will leave jailbars alone, which the other method will not. Unfortunately, if jailbars appears on the same line as foobar, it will change, too. Of course you can also use regular expression search patterns, and a few other commands in the replacement part of the text. If you use \( and \) in the pattern to escape a sequence (and use \1, \2, etc., you can do lots of nifty things. For example: :g/foo/s/^\([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\)/\2 \1/ will swap the first and second words on every line containing "foo". Special sequences allowed are: & everything which was matched by the search \[1-9] The contents of the 1st-9th \(\) pair \u The next character will be made uppercase \U The characters until \e or \E will be made uppercase \l The next character will be made lowercase \L The characters until \e or \E will be made lowercase \[eE] end the selection for making upper or lowercase 3.1 - My / key is broken! How can I search and replace? Well, okay, it doesn't really need to be a /. Lots of things will work fine. (letters, numbers and a few other things won't...) 3.2 - How do I run a program from within vi? :!cmd will run the program cmd. :sh will run an interactive shell. Within this shell, you may, if you want, run vi again. This is particularly useful when you are editing makefiles and config files for programs in an attempt to get a program to compile. The advantage over :e is that you do not need to save the file, and it will be in its old place when you exit the shell. (I advise saving the file anyway...) 3.3 - Ahhh!! I was writing my dissertation, and the computer crashed! Well, you should get mail about this, but you should be able to recover the file by typing vi -r where is the name of the file that you were editing at the time of the crash. vi -r will give you a list of files that can be recovered. 3.4 - Any tips for making vi programmer friendly? :set ai will make it auto-indent for you. :set sw=# where # is a number will set the shiftwidth (tabwidth). You can then use <<, >> to shift a line left or right. Plus, you can use <% to shift a {, ( or [ set left or right (with >%). You must be on top of the specific {, }, (, ), [ or ] of the pair to shift them. :set sm will show the matching {, ( or [ when you type the closing one. :set lisp will make some changes that are useful for lisp programming. () will move back and forth over s-expressions, and {} will move without stopping at atoms. 3.5 - Macros -- How do I write them? :map where is up to ten characters and is up to 100. This will make it so that whenever you type it will replace it with . All macros should start in command mode (except those defined with map!), but may end in any mode you desire. Remember to use before any control characters that you may use. If you are using an Ex command, such as |, it needs to be escaped while vi is scanning the line. You should map it as :map foo |. :unmap will remove the macro. :map! will make insert into the text of the document. map! macros may have lhs's that are much longer. 3.6 - How do I make a function key a Macro? If is #n where n is 0-9, it will be mapped to the appropriate function key. 3.7 - Is there anyway to abbreviate text? Yep, of course. This is vi, it can do anything. :ab email ellidz@midway.uchicago.edu will make it so that whenever you type email as a specific word, it will extend it to the entire unabbreviated word. :una email will unabbreviate it. 3.8 - How do I spell check the current document? Here is a macro to do it. These should be put in your .exrc file. (More on .exrc files later on.) It is a pretty simple macro, it just calls ispell on the current file. Of course, to use this you need ispell on your system. To use it, just hit V with vi. (V is not used by vi, so it makes a good key.) map V :w:!ispell % :e! The second makes it so that one does not need to hit return after it is done checking the spelling. 3.9 - How do I get rid the ^M's at the end of each line of my file? How do I make a macro to do it? These generally appear from DOS files that get converted to Unix. They're easy to get rid of. :%s///g will do it. The macro bit is a bit trickier. Not something that most people can guess on their own. Here it is: map v :%s///g Yes, that's right. 5 of them. The last one is to escape the enter. Two of the other four are to escape the other two 's. Since the macro gets read on the ex line, you need to have two 's (since you are searching for to replace it with nothing...) In general, if you are having trouble with macro that uses the ex line, you need to escape things a lot. Sometimes it is quicker to just keep throwing 's in until it works. 3.10 - I've got a hardcopy terminal, can I still use vi? Okay, okay, so I don't expect anyone to actually ask this... But, I thought it was bizarre enough to throw in anyway. (And, it actually answers a very common question...) vi will start up in a specific mode, called "open mode" in this situation. Things work more or less the same. Deleted characters will appear on your print out as \'s. vi will act as if the size of the window is only one line. ^r will retype the current line. z redraws the window around the current line. 3.11 - Oh, okay, is THAT what open mode is? But I don't have a hardcopy terminal, and it still starts in open mode! Well, what is happening here is that vi doesn't know what type of terminal you have. It decides that in this situation the best thing to do is to assume that you have the worst terminal possible. This might not seem useful, as not very many people need open mode, but it also is the mode that needs to know the least information about your terminal. Now, how to deal with it. It is possible to change it for the specific session, but in general, this is not useful. If you know your terminal type, you can set it from the Unix prompt (setenv TERM under csh and it's variants, and: TERM= ; export TERM under sh and its variants.). Better yet would to be to edit your .profile or .cshrc to include this so it is automatically done for you when you login. (Of course, you need to either know ed or be able to set it at the Unix prompt before you'll be able to edit the file...) If you do not know your terminal type, try vt100. Most modern terminals and terminal emulators can emulate vt100. If this does not work, find someone to help you. 3.12 - How can I get the source code to vi? Parts of source code (the parts derived from ed) is owned by SCO. The rest of it is owned by the REgents of the University of California. You can get a personal Unix source license for $100 from SCO. Details are available at: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/PUPS/getlicense.html You may also want to look at the source for some vi clones, however, as most of them are publicly available. 4.0 - More advanced topics in vi. 4.1 - I see that sections are defined by SHNHH HU and paragraphs by IPLPPPQPPLIbp by default? What language is that in? What in the world does it mean? Man pages are written in a language called nroff/troff. Nroff is a general purpose text formatting language, similar to TeX. What does this have to do with vi and the sections? Use the Unix more command to look at a man page (say, /usr/man/man1/vi.1 or something). You'll see parts of the page split into sections, like .SH Name. The .SH is defining a section of the man page. Notice that SH is the first two characters of the section set option. The section and paragraph sections are defined by a listing of pairs of macros for nroff/troff. The next section will start with a period and then any of the pairs of letters that the section is defined as. Paragraphs work the same way -- except that a blank line is also considered a paragraph break. 4.2 - But when I program, I've noticed that I can use ]] and [[ to move between functions. My functions don't have .SH or anything at the beginning, what gives? Luckily for many C programmers, an open curly brace at the beginning of a line is also defined as a section break. 4.3 - How do I work with multiple files at the same time? vi allows for multiple files to be open at the same time. Unlike many editors, you only see one file at a time. If you start vi with multiple files on the command line they'll all be opened up. You'll start out in the first file, and you can move to the next file by typing :n. If you've made changes to the current file that you don't want to keep, you can go on by using :n!. Note that this will discard any changes that you've made. If you want to save, you need to use :w first. 4.4 - So, I've started up vi, but now I want to be able to edit another file. How do I do this? :n will load that file into vi. You'll need to save your current file. 4.5 - How can I get back to the first file, though? :e # will edit the last file that you were editing. You can use this to swap back and forth quickly between two different files. If you are editing many files, you can use :n to cycle between them. 4.6 - But I'm only wanting to edit one file at a time. I've got one open and I want to switch permenatly to another file. How do I do that? Just use :e and it will load it up. 4.7 - How do I add another file into the middle of my current file? :r will read in a new file at the current location. It is worth noting that Unix in general deals with the output of commands as files in many respects. Because of this, you can easily read in the output of a command into the file: :r ! will read in the output. 5.0 - What's online at the vi archives? There is a FAQ posted frequently which gives a list of all the files that are online at the vi archive. It also gives a list of addresses which mirror the vi archive. The main address is ftp://alf.uib.no/pub/vi, but it is archived at many, many sites. The vi-archive faq lists all of them. Please check that faq before ftping to it, as there is almost definitely a closer and therefore faster site to you than the one in Norway. A few mirrors are: ftp://ftp.uwp.edu/pub/vi ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/text-processing/vi. ftp://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/vi ftp://ftp.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/misc/vi-archive The site has many, many files on vi, including a few clones. It also has the UCB distribution of vi, and lots of useful macros. Check it out. 6.0 - Silly vi tricks, and silly macros This section is for silly vi tricks, and silly macros. Actually, any interesting vi tricks and macros are acceptable, as long as they are not too lengthy. I will add any that are suggested to me that I think are reasonable. 6.1 - Silly vi tricks Note: Also check out the Silly macros down below. Many macros and tricks are interchangable. xp This will delete the character under the cursor, and put it afterwards. In other words, it swaps the location of two characters. ddp Similar to xp, but swapping lines. yyp duplicate a line uu Undo and redo last change. (This will take you to the last modification to the file without changing anything.) You can also use this to compare the changes to a line. Make the changes to the line, press U to undo the changes to the current line, and then press u to toggle between the two versions. :g/.*/m0 This will reverse the order of the lines in the current file. m0 is the ex command to move the line to line 0. :v/./d or :g/^$/d Removes all blank lines. :g/^[ ]*$/d Removes all lines that only have whitespace. :v/./$s/$/./|'';/./-1j|$d Replaces multiple blank lines with just one blank line. 6.2 - Silly macros Note: means hold down control, and hit x. Swap character and one vertically above: map * kxjphxkP Fold a line that's too long map g $80|F r Change case on most words map v ywmnoP:s/./\~/g0"nDdd`n@n Put `and' around the current word map *` i`ea' Put 'and' around the current word map *' i'ea' Put "and" around the current word map *" i"ea" Put `and' around the current word map! `` bi`ea' Split a line at the cursor, and put a > at the beginning of the next line. (For quoting Usenet, etc). I had some trouble with my old version of this under some versions, so I've redone it, and I think that it should work. map g may0OP`aoP:s/./ /g0i>$mb`ay$`bP'add Insert one character map g i$r Format a paragraph without the fmt program. (To use, use J a few times, then this a few times) map K 072lBhr Or, a little less elegantly, but without the need to use J and K multiple times. map K {wma}b:'a,.j:s/\(.........................................................\)/\1/g Make ctrl-x work as cut, ctrl-v as paste, ctrl-p as copy. You should mark the beginning of the area as m (use mm). (ctrl-c cannot be remapped when it is defined as the interrupt character in Unix.) map "zd`m map "zy`m map "zP`m Save a read-only file. Careful, it changes the permissions. When done, it changes them to read/write owner, read for everyone else. Note that this might not be the same as the original permissions. map K :!chmod 666 %:w! :!chmod 644 % vi status line (sort of...) [Note: It's slow...] map k map j map k k map j j map map map H H map M M map L L map G G map map center a line map = 080i $78hd0^D:s/ / /g$p redefine tab to insert 5 spaces instead of a tab marker map! switch current and last line (repeat to reverse a file) map v Gdd''Pj yank until end of line, run it in a shell and read in the result map v y$opI:r!"add@a allow vi to backspace over text that was inserted in a previous insert mode map! $Xs map! $Xs print the document to the default printer (for BSD replace lp with lpr). map v 1G!Glpu set # to toggle line numbers on and off: map \o# o:se nu:se nonu-:map \o# "wp map \d# "w2dd map \x# "xdd@x"xpk map # ma3L\o#\x#\d#`a: Quote the current paragraph with '>'s. map Z> mc{jma}kmb:'a,'bs/^ /> /'c Allow to suspend processes within insert mode map! :stop Make all tabs spaces map! Replace all tabs with the proper amount of spaces for the given tabstop. Removing the last two character (4) will allow you to specify the tabstop: #t4 map #t 1G!Gpr -t -e4 map #T !}pr -t -e4} Insert a ruler above the current line map #r Oi....+....1....+....2....+....3....+....4....+....5....+....6....+....7....+....8 This is a macro that redefines itself: (more for heuristic reasons than anything else) It inserts foo the first time it is run, and bar all subsequent times. map K ifoo:map K ibar This makes a end notes. It will insert a [#] at the current location and put a [#] at the bottom of the document and let you type there. Hitting `a will take you back to the original location once you are done with your end note. [#] will be the number of the end note, not the literal # character. (Pretty crazy, huh?) map K ma1GO[0]G$?\[[0-9]*\]lyt]`aaOpI:r!echo '1 A + p' | dc0"yD@y0i[A]kkJJJmb1Gdd`bF[yf]GopA 7.0 - Alphabetical vi quick reference ... means that something needs to be specified before or after the command, as appropriate. This is normally a cursor movement keys (h,j,k,l,w,b, etc.) or a line number. # (where # is a number) following command n times... : go to ex-mode ) next sentence ( previous sentence } next paragraph { previous paragraph ]] next section [[ previous section 0 beginning of line $ end of line ^ first non-whitespace character + first character of next line - first character of previous line (spacebar) next character (return) next line / search forward ? search backward % find match of current parenthesis, brace, or bracket , reverse direction of last f, F, t, or T ; repeat last f, F, t, or T . repeat last command ` goto mark ' goto beginning of line with mark `` return to previous mark or location before a search '' go to start of line of previous mark or location before search ~ switch case of current character " store in register @ execute command in register ! send next to command, replace output (eg !}fmt passes the current paragraph to the command fmt, and replaces the output with whatever fmt returns.) !! send line to command >> shift line one shiftwidth to the right << shift line one shiftwidth to the left >% shift until matching (, [, or { to the right <% shift until matching (, [, or { to the left a append after the current location A append at the end of the line ^a unused b beginning of previous word B beginning of previous word, ignore punctuation ^b scroll back one screen c change until... C change to end of line ^c ends insert mode, unused in command mode (if defined as interrupt) d delete until... D delete to end of line ^d scroll down half a window, moves to previous shiftwidth in insert mode e end of word E end of word, ignore punctuation ^e scroll screen down one line f find... F find backward... ^f scroll forward one screen g unused G ...Goto [defaults to end of file] ^g show status line h left H first line on screen ^h backspace in insert mode, left in command mode i insert before current location I insert before first non-whitespace character on line ^i tab in insert, unused in command j down J join next line with current line ^j down in command, create newline in insert k up K unused ^k unused l right L last line on screen ^l redraw screen m mark position into register M middle of screen ^m carriage return n repeat last search N repeat last search, reverse direction ^n down in command o open line below current O open line above current ^o unused p put below current line P put above current line ^p up in command q unused Q quit and run ex ^q unused r replace current character R replace characters until insert mode is left ^r redraw screen in command mode s substitute S substitute entire line ^s unused t to... T backward to... ^t moves to next shiftwidth. u undo last change U undo changes to current line ^u scroll up half a window v unused V unused ^v unused in command, quotes next character in insert w beginning of next word W beginning of next word, ignore punctuation ^w unused in command, in insert move back to beginning of previous word x delete current character X delete previous character ^x unused y yank... Y yank current line ^y scroll screen up one line z reposition screen around line (Return to top of screen, . to middle, - to bottom) ZZ write (only if changes have been made) and quit ^z unused 7.1 - Command mode input options ( : commands) (Note: this is not a canonical list, just some of the more important ones.) :r read into current text :r ! read output from command into current text :nr read in at line number :! run command, return :sh goto shell :so read and execute commands from :x write (only if changes have been made) and quit :wq write and quit :l1,l2w write between lines l1 and l2 to . If is not specified, assume current. If l1,l2 not specified, assume entire file (making it :w) :w >> append to . May use line numbers :w! overwrite current file :q quit :q! quit, forget changes :e edit without leaving vi :e! forget changes since last write :n edit next file :e +n edit at line n, if no end, assume end of file :n specify as new list of files to edit :e# edit alternate file (if :e is used, alternate is the original file) :args show files to be edited :rew rewind list of files to top :map m n create a macro (make m do n) :map! m n create an insert mode macro (make m do n) :unmap m destroy macro m :unmap! m destroy insert mode macro m :ab <1> <2> abbreviate - replace <1> with <2> whenever typed as a word :unab <1> unabbreviate <1> :cd cd to :set