Miscellaneous

The vi cheat sheet

Who is this for?

Most editors today are visual and follow a standard format. They have a bar at the top of the window and (starting on the left) have a drop down menu for: File, Edit, View, and so on. If you've used one editor, you will likely be able to use another. You may have to learn the fancy features, but the basics are the same.

Long ago, and in a galaxy far, far away, there was a time when there was no de facto standard. There was no such thing as X-Windows, or Windows. The guys at Apple were still laboring in their garage. Many editors operated on one line at a time and you couldn't see the previous or next line.

Enter VI. VI was really hot stuff when it came out. You could edit a whole page at a time, it was extensible, there were lots of powerful commands, etc. But that was a long time ago, and much better editors have been released since then. So you'll never have to use VI, right? Ok, picture this: some Jurassic Park remnant comes dragging his knuckles down the corridor at your latest gig. You have to write some code post haste and you have to do it on some Unix system (Sun Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Linux?! Guess what? The only editor on this box is VI. Hey, maybe you even learned how to use Emacs and somehow skip the VI stage (like I did). Sooner or later, you are going to have to know how to do this.

Don't worry. VI is really easy to learn. I'm going to lay out all the basics for you, i.e., the bare minimum you need to know to get through a job. If you need to know more...well then you have my sympathies.

A little background

VI is short for "Visual editor" and is pronounce "vee-eye." It may be the first popular Unix editor that allowed the user to edit more than one line at a time.
VI has three modes. They are: "escape", "insert", and "line".
When you first start VI, you will be in escape mode.

The Cheat Sheet

Escape mode commands to go into insert mode:

a	append after the cursor
A	append after the end of line
i	insert before the cursor
I	insert at the beginning of the line
o	open a new line below the current line
O	open a new line above the current line

Navigation keys

l	space forward
h	space backwards
j	move down one line
k	move up one line

To enter last line mode, type ":" then:

w	write
q	quit
q!	I really want to quit.
wq	save changes and quit

A few more useful things

CTRL-D	page down one page
CTRL-U	page up one page
u	undo last editing command
U	undo all changes made to the current line
f	find next occurrence of a word
F	find previous occurrence of a word

...my apologies to everyone who thinks VI is a great editor :-)