Learning Vim Gently

Download Learning Vim Gently

VI has been around for a long time. While there are many GUI text editors like gedit: vi and vim remain popular with system administrators as most of you must edit configuration files for example in /etc. It is a good tool for documentation as you will discover in this book. Also, you don’t need a graphical interface and may invoke vi or vim over a network using ssh or even the much-maligned telnet command and it is quite lightweight on your resources as well.

VIM is a worthy successor to VI – Unix’s ubiquitous text editor. VI has limited functionalities as compared to VIM and is limited to Linux/UNIX whereas VIM has been ported to almost all major Operating Systems like OS/2, all distributable of Linux etc. You can say VIM is a modern version of VI.

Content

Introduction to VI and VIM

Installation of VIM on Ubuntu

Working with VIM

Navigation commands

Command w

Command b

To go to the end of the line and then beginning of the line

To go to the middle and lower end of the screen

To go to the end and beginning of the file.

Editing commands

Deleting one character using x

Deleting a whole word using dw command

Deleting a whole line using the dd command

Redo command

Additional Editing commands

Copying and Pasting

Using the y command in Visual mode

Substitution command

Command-line mode commands

Forward slash / for searching

Question mark ? for searching

Graphical mode of VIM

Using System commands from vim

Running a command from the vim session

Advanced features of vim