The first time I saw vi text editor was when I reaches university, it seemed a little bit counterintuitive at the time. I think it is a normal feeling to new vi users, even more, if you are, like I was, used to Windows and GUIs but make no mistake, there is a good reason for this 30-year old tool still be widely used by many of the best developers in the world. A few days ago I was programming some rails application, and while doing some changes in a few files with vi editor I realized I couldn’t take full advantage of vi and do what I saw my teachers doing like !indenting! a text with few keyboard shortcuts, so, I spend two hours reading the vim help and I realized how fantastic vim is! Now if you wanna try vi I will give some little tips, like a mini tutorial for vi/vim beginners.
For showing you the shortcuts I’ll use a similar notation to the used on vim help.
<ESC><CTRL-v>5jI
This means you press ESC key then you press Ctrl and “v” key simultaneous then you press the number 5 followed by the “j” key and finally you press “I”. I think you can get the idea. If you can’t, vim isn’t for you or I’m worst teaching then writing English!
Ahhh… Another thing, Vim has something similar to a command line, when you do this <ESC>: you will start writing commands at the bottom of the screen for example, :q is for quitting the program. Of course when I say something started with “:” like “:q” I’m expecting you to write that on the command line, not in your text, so if you are in insert mode you have to do something like this <ESC>:q<ENTER>
Well… now when talked about insert mode I introduced one more thing; the vi working modes! When using vi you can switch between different working modes, for example to insert text you should be on INSERT MODE, when selecting text you are on SELECTION MODE, you have also REPLACE MODE, VISUAL MODE, and more. Those operating modes give you ultrafast access to key commands that can edit, insert, and move text in on-the-fly…
Here are some examples of commands:
Calling VIM:
Vi Open vim with no file.
vi PATH Open PATH file with vim, if the file doesn’t exist create it.
vi PATH + Open the PATH file and focus cursor at end of file.
vi PATH +10 Open file at line 10.
vi PATH +/regedor Open file with courser at the first occurrence of the word “regedor”
Saving/Quitting VIM:
:w Save
:q Exit without saving
:wq or : x or ZZ Exit and save
:w! Force Save
:q! Force Quit
:wq! Force Save and Quit
Well this is good for beginners. But for now I don’t have more time, I will set up a more complex tutorial with a few more advanced commands soon.
