By Vi, most people mean vim though nvi and vim are different from vi. Anyway let us talk about vi the same way we talk about vim.
I am going to talk only about advanced use. I am thinking that most of you will know how to use vi by now. Otherwise you dunno Linux anyway. ;) Okay how to do simple things that are really cool with vi? $ vi foo.txt Now inside vi, the : mode is most interesting. Obviously this only works under command mode. If you want to read the output of ifconfig, then : r !ifconfig will get you or :r !/sbin/ifconfig The buffer gets filled with the output. You can also format a text file by wrapping at 72 characters in which vi acts as a filtering agent. : %!fmt -w 72 will do it. Here, % stands for the whole text file you are editing and !(bang) escapes to the shell invokes fmt -w 72 and spits back the result into the vi buffer. Now you can also read files. :r /etc/passwd will read the file contents into the buffer. You can flip the character case using the ~ (tilde) operator. Just move over the characters pressing it. You can format the file and indent the loops and conditions by selecting the region and pressing = This only works in vim. :%= Or if you want to use 'v' for selecting then ggvG= You can check the man page of a word by pressing K under the word. You can search and replace with :%s/search/replace/ Of course searching string is a pattern and replacement is a literal. -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
