Название: Learning the vi and Vim Editors, Eighth Edition (Fourth Early Release)
Автор: Arnold Robbins, Elbert Hannah
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2021-01-25
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, rtf, epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

Vi and its derivatives are perhaps the most important family of text editors in the programming community. With this updated guide, Unix and Linux users will learn text editing basics for both vi and Vim ("vi improved") before moving onto advanced editing tools for each editor. Authors Elbert Hannah and Arnold Robbins cover the latest major releases of Vim, including 7.4, 8.0, and 8.2.

Whether you’re a programmer or computer analyst or you work with browsers or command-line interfaces, you’ll examine multiwindow editing, global search and replacement, power tools for programmers, and how to write interactive macros and scripts to extend the editor—all in the easy-to-follow style that’s made this book a classic.

Vi is the most useful standard text editor on your system. Unlike Emacs, it is available in nearly identical form on every modern Unix system, thus providing a kind of text-editing lingua franca. The same might be said of ed and ex, but screen editors are generally much easier to use. (So much so, in fact, that line editors have generally fallen into disuse.) With a screen editor, you can scroll the page, move the cursor, delete lines, insert characters, and more, while seeing the results of your edits as you make them. Screen editors are very popular, since they allow you to make changes as you read through a file, like you would edit a printed copy, only faster.

To many beginners, vi looks unintuitive and cumbersome—instead of using special control keys for word processing functions and just letting you type normally, it uses all of the regular keyboard keys for issuing commands. When the keyboard keys are issuing commands, vi is said to be in command mode. You must be in a special insert mode before you can type actual text on the screen. In addition, there seem to be so many commands.

Once you start learning, however, you realize that vi is well designed. You need only a few keystrokes to tell vi to do complex tasks. As you learn vi, you learn shortcuts that transfer more and more of the editing work to the computer—where it belongs.