1. Introduction
2. Basic crash course
3. Other Modes
3.1. A guide to NORMAL mode
3.1.1. Movement
3.1.2. Modifying, Deleting, Copying, Pasting
3.1.3. Repetition and how to avoid it
3.2. Ex mode
4. Searching and replacing
APPENDIX. VIM – Vi IMproved
APPENDIX.1. VISUAL mode
APPENDIX.2. Multiple Windows
Final Words

1. Introduction

If you are trying to work at a command line in pretty much any Operating System, no matter if it is a GNU/Linux brand such as Ubuntu or Fedora Core, another UNIX-like system like Mac OS X or FreeBSD or even Microsoft Windows, you will most definately need a text editor sooner or later. If you are using a UNIX-like system, like GNU/Linux variants, there are many text editors that may or may not be installed. Luckily there is one de-facto standard:
vi is included in almost every GNU/Linux or UNIX distribution. “vi” is a truncation of the word “visual” and has, contrary to popular belief, nothing to do with the Roman number 6. Many people are not too fond of vi, but are, alas, often forced into using it when it is the only known option. You may prefer easier editors like gedit (Gnome), kate (KDE), emacs or ne (command line), but these may not be present when working at the command line.
Therefore, it is best to know at least the basics of vi and to understand it a little better; the basics of survival in vi, which you will learn in this guide. Unlike what you may have heard about the invention of the language C, the vi editor was not the idea of some kind of sick joke. It was for real and it served a real purpose. I am writing this in vi.

vi is very old, 1976 to be exact – that is only 6 years after 1970-01-01, which is the second no. 0, the big bang, the birth of Jesus Christ of UNIX system clocks. In the age of informatin and the internet, 30 years is practically a century. Remembering the age can help you to accept it if you do not particularly like it. Still, however, many people like the fact that they can memorize the keystrokes and be at home with it for quick tasks, and they like its tiny footprint of disk space and RAM. They like it both as the old reliable standard on most distributions of GNU/Linux and as a simple but powerful editing tool.

Individuals who use computers for office work or leisure purposes may find the vi editor as an excellent tool for editing scripts in GNU/Linux and other UNIX like systems. In addition, this command line text editor may also be handy when configuring remote terminals over broadband internet connection, such as dedicated or virtual private servers.

The vi editor has an interesting history. It was created in a Berkeley University dorm room, Evans Hall, in 1976 by Bill Joy and some of his friends, although he was the one who fleshed most of it out, using the Pascal language. He designed it for a version of Unix he was working on at Berkeley University called BSD Unix, which stands for Berkeley Software Distribution Unix and forms the base of some modern Unices such as the polular FreeBSD.
Bill Joy eventually moved on to Sun Microsystems as one of its original founding members and has since moved on to other projects. Before Bill wrote vi, the students at the university were using an editor called ed. The ed tool, still as widespread as vi, unfortunately, is much harder to use. The students
discovered that they could use terminal escape codes so that the terminal moved the cursor to the bottom, and they dubbed this “open mode” where short commands could be typed. There were later derivatives of the ed tool called em and en, and students were experimenting with reprogramming each and borrowing each other’s features. Eventually the most popular became Bill’s project, vi. When the VAX came about, the terminal escape codes standardized as VT100 (Vax Terminal 100) and this carried over into the BSD Unix and is still there today, implemented, for example, in the Linux console and xterm. These codes were utilized in moving the cursor around in the editor, scrolling sections, blocking off certain sections so that they do not
scroll, and other cursor movement features. Anyway, what is most important to note about vi’s history is that there was very limited memory and disk space, so commands seemed to be more efficient if they were short keystrokes, rather than typing words. Also, menus and even a mouse weren’t invented yet at XEROX PARC center, so short keystroke commands seemed to fit the ticket. Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc program would later hinge off of that aspect and use keystrokes the brought up menus, and that approach led to the success of Lotus 1-2-3. So short keystrokes it became, and each of us who use Linux should get to know how to survive in using these keystrokes. Like many things in Unix and Linux, when enough people know about a command and
depend on it, it becomes one of the defacto items that just has to be rolled in with it, like it or leave it, or enough people will complain.

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2. Basic crash course

Let’s start with the most basic vi knowledge – what you will need to use vi when it is the only choice. vi is different from most editors in that it has different so-called modes. When you start vi, you are in NORMAL mode. Here every key has some special function. For example, pressing ‘x’ deletes the character under the cursor. Beginners will start off preferring the INSERT mode; you enter it by pressing ‘i’ in NORMAL mode. Here letters are letters, backspace is backspace etc – like in any old editor. This is a kind of “safe” mode for beginners, as, unlike in NORMAL mode, keys don’t do unexpected things. When you have made the changes you want, switch back to NORMAL mode by pressing <ESC>. You can always return to insert mode by pressing i. Now you will want to do some special things such as saving. Here are some command you
should know:

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3. Other Modes

By now you should be able to survive in vi for a quick config file edit, code hack or simple ASCII art.But vi is a lot more than insert mode…

3.1. A guide to NORMAL mode

Normal mode is, as you may have gathered or guessed the vi mode. You can do almost anything from inside NORMAL mode.

3.1.1. Movement

Even in NORMAL mode, you can use the arrow keys to navigate, but this always means moving your hand from the letters to the arrow keys and back, resulting in some latency. On laptop keyboards, this is especially inconvieneant. Instead, vi offers the following movement keys:

On most keyboards, these keys are under a touch typist’s right hand
and thus very accessible. By the way, vi is a perfect editor to learn
touch
typing with ! These keys can be memorized in different ways. h and l are the furthest left and right of the set; the letter j
looks slightly like it’s pointing downward and the key usually has a little stud (for finding the key when touch typing) at the bottom.

Here are some more movement keys, some of which are especially useful in combination with other commands (see next section):

3.1.2. Modifying, Deleting, Copying, Pasting

Obviously, you are in vi to edit text. You could also be in vi to hear beeps when you press some wierd keys, but then you probably wouldn’t be reading a guide to vi. You have already learned about INSERT mode, but there is more to it that just ‘i’ ! To “just” get into INSERT mode, you can use the following commands:

vi also offers simple command for single-character deleting and editing:

Now let’s go over to some more larger-scale editing in NORMAL mode, as you seriously don’t want to use ‘x’ or ‘X’ to delete a paragraph of text, for example. This is also the movement commands from section 3.1.1. become really useful.

for better comprehention, a few examples are in order.

There are also a few special cases, namely:

when you delete, change or yank a line, p and P also operate line-wise: p places the yanked line after the current line, P places it before the current line.

3.1.3. Repetition and how to avoid it

Repetition is annoying and senceless. vi has some features to make your edit easier in this respect. First of all comes the command . (yes, the period.); it repeats the last command. For instance, if your last command wasdd, then pressing . deletes another line.
Counts are another very useful feature that let you repeat a command a specific number of times. The syntax is as follows:

This also works for motions that are part of a command. A few examples:

To round the section off, I’ll show you some commands that every editor, including Microsoft® Notepad, supports:

Unlike Microsoft® Notepad, vi supports doing this multiple times.

3.2. Ex mode

“ex mode” is a command-line like mode. in it you can type certain longer commands, which are executed by typing <ENTER> There are multiple ways to use it:

Sound familiar ? the saving, editing and quitting commands in section 2 where actually ex mode commands. Here are some important ex mode commands:
(without the colon): part in square brackets are optional.

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4. Searching and replacing

Searching and replacing are two very important features when editing text files; just think of how easy it is to lose a line in a large config file or on an enourmous screen. I’ll start with the simpler of the two: searching. The commands are issued in NORMAL mode.

This may sound dreadfully complicated to you, who may be thinking along the lines of “regular expression… huh?”. Well, don’t panic. Regular expressions are a standardized way of expressing patterns to search for. The syntax is not easy to understand and is beyond the scope of this document. So you get the idea what it is, I’ll give a few examples: ‘[0-9]{1,3}’ matches any one to three-digit number and ‘joe’ matches the three letters ‘joe’ (lowercase) and nothing else. If you’re not dealing with special characters, you can forget about the regex buisiness.

Now to replacing. The syntax was inherited from [s]ed, so it will be familiar to the gurus These are ex mode commands, and again use regular expressions, this time with bracket substitution, as it is replacing. (again, you can safely ignore that mostof the time)

APPENDIX. VIM – Vi IMproved

There are many vi clones and dereviatives out there. In fact, when you open “vi”, you will probably not see the original vi, but a clone like nvi or vim. VIM is probably by far the most advanced clone; it has numerous features that are, among others, interesting for programmers. Here I will explain two
features that are, in my eyes, the most interesting additions apart from syntax highlighting, which is enabled with the ex command syntax on: Multiple windows and VISUAL mode.

APPENDIX.1. VISUAL mode

Yes, another mode. In this mode, you can select text and perform operations that usually take a movement as argument. For example, selecting text and pressing ‘d’ will delete the text. As usual, you enter VISUAL mode from NORMAL mode, but unlike the other modes, VISUAL has multiple (three) sub-modes.

normal VISUAL mode

This is pretty much like selecting in most graphical editors: you select character-wise. Let me show you an example:

Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
    Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
        Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
    Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
        Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:

VISUAL LINE

This is a little bit niftier. It selects line-wise, not
character-wise. Doing ‘d’ on VISUAL LINE selected text is like doing
‘dd’ on all the lines.

Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
    Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:

        Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:

VISUAL BLOCK

This is the niftiest of selection modes. Here you select blocks (duh). I cannot convey this better than with the example below.

Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:

Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:
Some text text text just to show the readers what VISUAL mode is all about. As I said this is:

APPENDIX.2. Multiple Windows

Vim has support for splitting the screen into multiple windows. These are not the overlapping windows you know from popular graphical user interfaces, these parts of a split screen as users of GNU Emacs and GNU screen will know. With them you can, for example, edit in one part of the screen and look at a different file or a different
part of the current file at the same time. To see what this is, well, grab a copy of vim and try it out ! Here I will only list the most important window-related commands. use the ex command help usr_08 in vim to get to the relevant section in the online documentation.

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Final Words

As you have seen, vi is a complicated, unusual editor with many annoyances to the normal user. Surprisingly, the vi editing model has greatly improved productivity of many, and, if you edit much, like a programmer, could increase your efficiency. But if you actually do decide to seriously learn vi or vim, try to use it exclusively, at least for a time. And, above all, stay away from INSERT mode as much as you can. over-using INSERT mode won’t help in the slightest if you want to really use it.

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