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The VI FAQ
Table of Contents
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 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.
More importantly, why should *I* use it?
vi is default visual editor under Unix, and is therefore shipped with
all recent version 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.
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."
Unix. That's it. 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.)
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.
Just to list a few: STvi (STevie), elvis, vile, vim, and nvi, xvi.
elvis is available for: Amiga, DOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Atari (v1.7).
STevie is available for: Atari ST, DOS, Unix, Mac System 7.
Mac System 7 is available at any info-mac mirror in /info-mac/text
(Such as ftp.hawaii.edu)
nvi is the vi that will ship with BSD 4.4.
vim is available for: Amiga, DOS, Mac System 7, Unix.
Amiga, DOS, and the source are available at:
ftp.fu-berlin.de /misc/editors/vim
Mac System 7 is available at any info-mac mirror in /info-mac/text
(Such as ftp.hawaii.edu)
vile is available for: DOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS.
xvi is available for: DOS, Unix.
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.
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