If you are of the faint of heart Find another place to be! Otherwise strap on your seat belt for 90 minutes of intense fun and learning!

Purpose and Orientation You should be familiar with Linux and have used vi. If you are an intrepid buck-beginner, we invite you to try and follow along.

We are going to bulk up your vi skills to make you faster and better at vi. If you ascend its learning curve, you can save many hours of work. We will review some fundamentals so we all speak the same language, then we will have a punishing test of your skills.

The vi editor will give you speed and efficiency when processing and searching text. This skill is very useful to programmers, data miners, HTML/CSS authors, and users of TeX/LaTeX. What, you don't use LaTeX? You are wasting your life away fighting stupid Microsoft Word! LaTeX eliminates the version headaches of word processors because all files are stored as plain text.

All pink boxes are UNIX sessions. A generic UNIX prompt is represented with a $. Yours will vary depending upon how your machine is configured.

Attention Ubuntu Users! Make sure you install vim and that you are not stuck in the tiny world of vi-tiny. If you are, here is the cure. Open a terminal window and enter it.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install vim

Attention Mac Users! Make sure you turn on syntax coloring. To do this, follow these instructions to the letter!

1. Open a terminal window. If you have never used terminal before, it is in Applications/Utilities. Drag its icon onto your app dock. Now type

   $ sudo vi /usr/share/vimrc
   

2. Enter your password when prompted to do so.
3. Type G.
4. Type o.
5. Enter these lines of text exactly as shown, including spacing, or you will be punished by vexatious error messages. Do not put spaces around the = sign!

syntax on
set tabstop=4
set et

6. Hit ESC.
7. Type :wq

You are ready now.

Before you begin, make a directory called BootCamp to hold all of the examples you create today. Also, bookmark this page for your future reference.

Starting vi The vi command takes as argument a file name. If the file exists, it is opened by vi; otherwise, an empty file by the name specified is created.

$ vi fileName

We will now create a file named program.c. At the UNIX command line, enter the following. We will do a little preview of what is to come.

$ vi program.c

When the new vi session opens, it looks like this. We will type some stuff here and get a preview.

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"program.c" [New File]

On the Importance of File Extensions UNIX cares not a whit about file extensions, unlike its dumber cousin Windoze. However, vi uses file extensions to determine file type and provide that godsend, syntax coloring. Said coloring saves tons of stupid mistakes and gobs of work. This table shows a small sample of coloring schemes that are available. There are tons of these.

Are you in the mode tonight? The vi editor has there modes, which we describe here.

• command mode This is the mode in which you enter vi. It offers mobility and search/replace capabilities. It can also change the state of the editor to alter its behavior.
• insert mode In this mode, you enter text by typing. You can also use this mode to do GUI pasting.
• visual mode This mode allows you to select text for copying, pasting, deletion or writing to a file.

This picture depicts the modes of vi and their relationships.

     $ UNIX 

     -------------vi fileName ↓----------------------------------
     |                                                          |
     |     -----iaoIAO, etc ↓-------    ------------------      |
     |     |                       |    | visual mode     |     |
     |     |                       |    |-----------------|     |
     |     |  insert mode          |    | character:      |     |
     |     |  Enter text by        |    |   select        v     |
     |     |  typing.              |    |   textically    ←    |
     |     |                       |    |-----------------|     |
     |     |                       |    | line:           V     |
     |     |                       |    |   select text   ←    |
     |     |                       |    |   by whole lines|     |
     |     |                       |    |-----------------|     |
     |     |                       |    | block:          ctrl-v|
     |     |                       |    |   select a      ←    |
     |     |                       |    |   block of      |     |
     |     |                       |    |   text          |     |
     |     ------ESC↓---------------    -------ESC↓-------|     |
     |                                                          |
     |     Command Mode:  mobiility, search, replace            |
     |     copy, paste, change editor settings                  |
     |                                                          |
     ------------------------------------------------------------

Introducing Command Mode

When you enter vi, it is in command mode. This is the mode that greets you each time you have a vi session. Hence we will introduce it first and return to it several times. We begin with some basic commands. Obtain the file sampler.txt; we are going to open this file using vi and try some stuff in it.

First, let us learn some mobility commands. Now open this file by typing the following.

$ vi sampler.txt

A little Text Manipulation We show a few useful coommands for maipulating text in command mode.

Insert Mode

Getting In To type in characters, you need to be in insert mode. We are going to practice the most important ways to get into insert mode. Power users know them and use them all often.

First we show the six basic ways every piker knows.

Mnemonic Step on your cat's tail and what does he say? IAO!!

If you only know the six modes above, you are a vi castrato.

Now for some power modes. These are extremely useful in "search and destroy" find/replace procedures.

We are going to practice these. You should exercise them a lot and get them to the "spinal cord" level.

Are you dotty? Dot repeats the last vi command

Search and Destroy! Search, change quarry, then find other and change using . This is a lot safer than doing a global search-and-replace.

Command Mode, a Reprise

Know your Colon If, whilst in command mode, you hit the colon key, the colon appears at the bottom of the screen.

There are four types of colon commands: mobility commands, changes of editor environment, colon-bang escapes, and file operations. We begin with file operations.

Ready, set, Go! The set command changes your editing environment. We show some important commands here. The word set is always preceded by a colon.

Visual Mode

Before we go much further, let us learn how to use visual mode to select text. This is key for copying, pasting, searching and for a variety of other reasons you might want to control the scope of an operation.

Mastering this maode has great benefits and it can make you more efficient.

Three Modes in One Visual mode is reallly three different modes.

• Character Hit v in command mode to enter this mode. Move the cursor around; it selects text "textically." You can go forwards or backwards.
• Line Hit V in command mode to enter this mode. This selects whole lines and can go forward or backward.
• Block Hit control-v. Move the cursor and watch a block of text be selected!

With visual mode under control, we can now get to the full power of search/replace in vi.

Mabel If you are a vi user, you are familiar with Mabel, the unstable buffer. Use Mabel to keep stuff around for just a little while while copying and pasting. Let us begin with copy and paste. Each time new stuff is put in Mabel, the old stuff is overwritten.

Hoist them Cookies, It's Time to get Buffer! Mabel is convenient, .... but she's unstable. You also have 26 named buffers. Here's the inside dope.

In this table, letter is any letter a-z and number is a positive integer which, if omitted, is taken to be 1.

Do not hit a : before using a buffer comand! The editor does its work silently. Whereever you are, just type the quote mark, then the buffer letter, then the command.

You can use thes to store frequently typed stuff that is annoying to haul around and copy. We will do an example here with comment boxes.

Cookery with vi: A Few Useful Recipies

Copy-Paste from a GUI This is sometimes necessary. You can copy text from any application in the usual way. Then when you are ready to paste in vi, do the following.

• Linux Go into command mode and enter :set paste. Failure to do this can cause "spraying". If that happens, hit ESC then u to undo, and try again. Get into insert mode, then paste into a terinal using control-shift-V. Pasting in this way just plays a recording of the keystrokes you used to enter the text originally.
• Mac Follow the Linux instructions, then paste in the usual way.

Copy-Paste from a Terminal Window to a GUI In Linux, Select the text you want by dragging with the mouse. Then hit control-shift-C. This copies the text into the system clipboard. In a mac, just select and copy as you would otherwise.

All of My Text is Ragged and Sloppy Select a ragged paragraph with visual mode. Then hit gq (think: Gentlemen's Quarterly) and your text will be tidied up. This recipe also works when you paste in text from a word processor (Are you really using one of those...?) and you get extremely long lines.

How can I comment a range of lines? Select them using block-visual moode. Then hit I and type the comment token. Once this is done hit ESC, then enter. You can also use this to tab in a range of lines.