Note: Always make a copy of an existing file prior to editing with vi or any editor. This is especially critical when editing system and configuration files. Ken has used Red Hat Linux since and has written ebooks, whitepapers, actual books, thousands of exam review questions, and hundreds of articles on open source and other topics. More about me. Relive our April event with demos, keynotes, and technical sessions from experts, all available on demand. Enable Sysadmin. An introduction to the vi editor.
Note: In vi's Command mode, almost every letter on the keyboard has a function. Topics: Command line utilities Text editors Linux. Ken Hess Ken has used Red Hat Linux since and has written ebooks, whitepapers, actual books, thousands of exam review questions, and hundreds of articles on open source and other topics.
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This motivated several people to create open-source versions of vi. Moolenaar started with the open source code for STEVIE, then added a few customizations, according to a lecture he gave on the 25th anniversary of Vim. Moolenaar also remembers posting the second version to the Usenet newsgroup comp. This week's post: Parsing Vim's prestigious pedigree! That's just too funny! Target points out that after four decades of development, Vim has seeped into the culture of the technology world.
Vim 8. And this March Linux Journal polled its readers — and concluded that Vim was the most-preferred text editor with 35 percent of the votes, but far ahead of the 19 percent who chose Emacs, with other votes going to Sublime Text 10 percent and Atom 8 percent.
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Sponsored Feed. Observability: Modern tools for modern challenges in multicloud environments. Azure Security must enable change to effectively support remote employees: Part 3. Therefore it is very important to easily recognize the structure of the code. Since everybody uses his own style of coding, and not everyone pays enough attention to the layout, the code may take time to understand. Highlighting items in the text can be of help here.
For example, by making all comments blue it is easy to spot a short statement in between long comments. It's also easier to recognize the structure of the file when quickly paging through it. Highlighting keywords can help spotting errors. The author has a tendency to type " defined" instead of " define". With highlighting switched on, the first one stays black, while the second one becomes brown.
That makes it easy to see this mistake when it happens. Unmatched closing parentheses can be marked as an error, with a red background. That is a great help when changing a complicated "if" statement or Lisp code. Highlighting is also useful for the last used search pattern. For example, when searching for the "idx" variable in a function, all its occurrences in the code will get a yellow background.
That makes it very easy to see where it is used and check where its value is changed. The syntax highlighting is completely adjustable. Everybody can add his own language if it's not already included with the Vim distribution. But since there are syntax files for about languages now, mostly you just have to switch the syntax highlighting on and your files are coloured.
Thanks to all the people who have submitted and are maintaining syntax files for everybody to use. Folding In Vim 5. The question was: What next? A survey was held to ask Vim users which features they would like to see added to Vim.
The number one requested feature deserves more explanation. It is as if the text were on a long roll of paper, which can be folded to hide the contents of each chapter, so that you only see the chapter titles. This gives a very good overview of what a file contains. A number of large functions, occupying thousands of lines, can be viewed as a list of function names, one per line.
You can move to the function you want to see and open the fold. Adding folding was a lot of work. It has impact on all parts of Vim. The displaying of text is different, and many commands work differently when the cursor is in a fold, but it mostly works now. And there are actually several ways to use folding: Manually: use commands to create and delete folds. This can also be used in a function to fold your text in any way you like. On syntax: use the syntax highlighting mechanism to recognize different items in the text and define folds with it.
On indent: the further a line is indented the deeper it will be folded. By expression: define an expression that tells how deep a line is folded. By markers: put markers in the text to specify where a fold starts and ends. Why so many different ways? Well, because the preferred way of folding depends on both the file you are editing and the desires of the user.
Folding with markers is very nice to precisely define what a fold contains. For example, when defining a fold for each function, a comment in between functions could belong to the previous or the next function. But if you edit files in a version-controlled project, you are probably not allowed to add markers.
Then you can use syntax folding, because it works for any file in a certain language, but doesn't allow you to change where a fold starts or ends. A compromise is to first define folds from the syntax and then manually adjust them.
But that's more work. Thus the way folding was implemented in Vim is very flexible, to be able to adjust to the desires of the user. Some related items have not been implemented yet, like storing the folding state of a file. This is planned to be added soon, before version 6. Indenting Giving a line the right indent can be a lot of work if you do it manually. The first step in doing this automatically is by setting the 'autoindent' option. Vi already had it.
It simply indents a line by the same amount as the previous line. This still requires that you add space below an "if" statement and reduce space for the "else" statement.
Vim's 'cindent' option does a lot more. For C programs it indents just as you expect. And it can be tuned to follow many different indenting styles. It works so well that you can select a whole file and have Vim reindent it.
The only place where manual correction is sometimes desired is for continuation lines and large "if" statements. Only recently a new, flexible way of indenting has been added. It works by calling a user defined function that returns the preferred indent.
The function can be as simple or as complex as the language requires. Since this feature is still new, only indenting for Vim scripts is currently included in the distribution. Hopefully people will write indent functions for many languages and submit them to be included in the distribution, so that you can indent your file without having to write an indent function yourself. A disadvantage of using a user defined function is that it is interpreted, which can be a bit slow.
A next step would be to compile the function in some way to be able to execute it faster. But since computers keep getting faster, and indenting manually is slow too, the current interpreted functions are very useful already.
Vile is the only vi clone that has a somewhat primitive and non-standard macro language YEML -- yet another macro language inherited from its Micro-emacs roots. But it also has built in Perl interpreter! That instantly makes it one of the best VI clone Brian Moore's web page -- nice page, but some links are broken. Index of -pub-Linux-apps-editors-vi.
The Elvis Text Editor Homepage. Got early Perl and TCL scripting support v. Looks like a dying clone Vol 25, No. A : Vol 25, No. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine. We are making such material available to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social issues.
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