| vi guide rev'd |
Aug. 01, 2008
 O'Reilly has brought out its (count 'em!) seventh edition of "Learning the vi and Vim Editors." First published in 1986, this classic teaches basic and advanced features of the world's most popular text editor, a tool every system administrator and desktop Linux user ought to know.
(Click for larger view of the book's cover, on which a tarsier (nocturnal lemur) is depicted
Versions of vi are built into nearly every Linux system in existence. As a result, learning vi is a time-honored first step to learning Linux itself, especially for workstation users and Unix system administrators (programmers may favor the less mode-based Emacs editor, a much larger and more full-featured editor).
Learning vi takes a bit of effort, due to its separate command and editing "modes," so having a combined tutorial and reference book may help. Another option might be to install the full runtime version of vim (most Linux distros seem to come with "vim-tiny" these days) and then invoke the built-in tutorial by typing "vimtutor."
Vimtutor
(Click to enlarge)
Noting that vi is even gaining popularity on Windows, while Vim is built into Mac OS X, O'Reilly says its guide also discusses nvi, elvis, and vile, three popular vi clones. Touted book features include:- Multi-window editing
- Interactive macros and scripts
- Power tools for programmers
- Moving around
- Buffers and other advanced features
- Global search and replace
- Customizing vi
- Executing shell commands
- Extended text objects
- Regex
- gVim (GUI Vim) features
- Syntax highlighting
- Folding and extended tags
Additionally, there's an alphabetical quick reference to both vi and ex mode commands, O'Reilly says.
The book was written by:- Elbert Hannah, described as a professional software engineer and software architect recently retired from the telecom industry
- Linda Lamb, an O'Reilly Media editor
- Arnold Robbins, a programmer and technical book author
Availability
The 492-page book "Learning the vi and Vim Editors" is available now. It costs $35 direct from Amazon.
-- Henry Kingman
:wq
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