Since you probably want to define more than one mapping, add another character. Suppose you have a directory that contains these files: To edit the last one, you use the command: It's easy to type this wrong. What if you want to read the file above the first line? These lines are equal in both files. In the user manual we will either use the full name of command, or a short version that is still readable. tells vim that you are performing a filter operation. Often these can be deleted without changing the amount of white space. They are indicated in the picture with "<- fold". The :global command can be combined with the :move command to move all the lines before the first line, resulting in a reversed file. This can be done with the line number zero. Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distribution for both desktop and server usage. If you want, you can also specify a particular line number - the output will be added after that particular line. For Unix, this should work. In the GUI use the Edit/Color Scheme menu. How about the last line? It can be downloaded on Vim official site. When youâre in command mode, youâll want to remember the following keys and what they do: 1. h moves the cursor one character to the left. One such case is taking text from a buffer and placing it into Command-line mode. You start Visual mode by pressing "v". Regular expressions are an extremely powerful and compact way to specify a search pattern. Just like "d$" deletes until the end of the line, "c$" changes until the end of the line. For example, "d" is the delete operator. Therefore, you can best do this manually. The command "fx" searches forward in the line for the single character "x". The pattern "include" matches the word include anywhere on the line. Then press to really jump to that location. There are several others you might want to try out. 3. k moves the cursor up one line. Changes you make to the file are reflected in what you see.Using vi you can insert text anywhere in the file very easily. To increase the size of a window: Ctrl-W +. To solve this, set the 'background' option. But not always! Obviously, this only works when you have a working mouse. vim guesses the background color that you are using. Change the commands that were wrong. The "d$" command deletes from the cursor to the end of the line, which is an inclusive motion, thus the last character of the line is included in the delete operation: There is a pattern here: operator-motion. For example, you can start a new vim session by running the following command from the command line: This will place you in a new vim editing window, which will show a tilde ("~") on any line that is empty of text. If you want to see the list of files, use this command: This is short for "arguments". However, it is deleted as soon as writing the file was completed successfully. Similarly "\<" only matches at the begin of a word. If you want syntax highlighting only when the terminal supports colors, you can put this in your vimrc file: If you want syntax highlighting only in the GUI version, put the ":syntax enable" command in your gvimrc file. If you are in the bottom window it will jump to the first window. Press Enter. To tell vim to format the current paragraph: This starts with the "gq" command, which is an operator. If you want to type new text the white space can remain, thus you use "cis". It is a 30 minute tutorial that teaches the most basic vim functionality hands-on. But only in this chapter, not in the next one. command reloads the original version of the file. To search for a string, use the "/string" command. Also, there are keyboards which do not have arrow keys, or which locate them in unusual places; therefore, knowing the use of the hjkl keys helps in those situations. In this case "is" stands for the short name of "incsearch". "o" only takes you to one of the other corners, diagonally. And it does insert text in a short line. To address the second line below the match: The offsets can also be used with the other items in a range. The command: results in (starting with the original line): Other flags include p (print), which causes the ":substitute" command to print out the last line it changes. The fold will open, and you can see the text that it contains. The result is: The "O" command (uppercase) is similar, but opens a line above the cursor instead of below it. vim has many options. You can then type any command of your choice. vim installs with a built-in tutorial system called the vimtutor to help you learn vim commands. To do this you use the command: Let's look at this command in detail. Alternatives to vim are the command-line editor's nano and joe. If you have selected some text in Visual mode, and discover that you need to change the other end of the selection, use the "o" command. The command may have arguments. Now you can use the commands defined in this plugin to justify text. Thus it removes the line breaks. Command mode; Insert mode; Last line mode; 1. Some people find spaces and tabs at the end of a line useless, wasteful, and ugly. This continues until you type . And then press to return to normal mode. Sometimes you only want to see what a file contains, without the intention to ever write it back. But the pattern "^include" matches the word include only if it is at the beginning of a line. Thus you can use this to move through a paragraph, much faster than using "l". Later you will learn how to do this without exiting vim. The, A single dash specifies that the file to edit is to be read from, The file to edit and the initial cursor position depends on a "tag", a sort of. Here are some basic Vim commands to cut, copy and paste portions of text. A mapping enables you to bind a set of vim commands to a single key. Thus the single fold line at the top stands for 123 text lines. When the text is only part of a file, you could move to the start of the text, type "g Ctrl-G", move to the end of the text, type "g Ctrl-G" again, and then use your brain to compute the difference in the word position. Suppose you search for "horse", then for "Hello", then for "helium", then for "habit". If you try to make a change you get this error message: You could use the -M argument to set up vim to work in a viewer mode. Delete word under the cursor (excluding white space). The arguments for the substitute command are "/from/to/". To start vim with all your favorite option settings and mappings, you write them in what is called the vimrc file. Move the cursor to the second line and type: The file named "patch" will be inserted, with this result: The ":read" command accepts a range. It waits for you to type a character, and will replace the character under the cursor with it. For example, the pattern "c.m" matches a string whose first character is a "c", whose second character is anything, and whose the third character is "m". Linux uses a lot of configuration files, you'll often need to edit them and vim is a great tool to do so. Thus the next time you do ":write", it will write "move.c". We already had operator-motion and Visual mode. You can switch between Insert mode and Replace mode with the key. Suddenly comments are blue, keywords brown and strings red. If you have a date command that accepts the "-u" argument. A common issue is that after moving down many lines with "j" your cursor is at the bottom of the screen. Again, short lines that do not reach into the block are excluded. Also, for the "n" and "N" commands. Except for some often used commands like ":w" (":write") and ":r" (":read"). The following characters are optional. To make the window appear at the left side, use: Actually, the || lines in the middle will be in reverse video. A few more things you can do with tab pages: The "." The 'winheight' option can be set to a minimal desired height of a window and 'winminheight' to a hard minimum height. The solution for this is called Tab pages. Now you move the cursor to define your block. Normal mode commands can not be used directly. For example, the preceding command changes the line: To change every occurrence on the line, you need to add the g (global) flag. Now type. The output might look like this: These are the files you started vim with. To make it write only the current line into a file: The first line always has number one. Most often, vim is started to edit a single file using the following command. While you do this, the text is highlighted. That's because the ` command is a jump itself, and the position from before this jump is remembered. For example: In case you have messed up an option value, you can set it back to the default by putting an ampersand (&) after the option name. If you make changes to a file and forgot that it was read-only, you can still write it. The command ">" shifts the selected text to the right one shift amount, inserting whitespace. This means you are editing the second file out of three files. vim checks the 'shell' option and sets related options automatically, depending on whether it sees "csh" somewhere in 'shell'. If you use MSWindows-compatible key mappings Ctrl-Y will redo a change instead of scroll. Or more specifically, it deletes a word and then puts you in Insert mode. Now you move the cursor to where you want to put the line and use the "p" (put) command. A disadvantage is that you can't see the man page and the text you are working on at the same time. To make this happen while inserting text, set the 'textwidth' option: To check the current value of 'textwidth': Now lines will be broken to take only up to 72 characters. At all times, to get back to Normal mode (no matter what mode you are in), press the key. Use ":clist" to see all the matches and where they are. This is extremely useful for developers and sysadmins alike. After you execute the ":map" command, all you have to do to put {} around a word is to put the cursor on the first character and press F5. Use the 'suffixes' option to specify files that are less important and appear at the end of the list of files. For example "50%" moves you to halfway the file. You will see right away that the whole line is highlighted, without moving around. These are called backreferences. When you are writing an e-mail message, you may want to include another file. ": "cis" consists of the "c" (change) operator and the "is" text object. The easiest way to open a new window is to use the following command: This command splits the screen into two windows and leaves the cursor in the top one: What you see here is two windows on the same file. Not even when the sentence continues. Because you deleted an entire line, the "p" command placed the text line below the cursor. If you type "/the" it will also match "there". It then puts you in Insert mode so that you can type in a string, which is added to the end of each line. This is required. For example, performing text substitution with %s, or invoking a shell command with :!. A window will open to display the man page for strstr(). This displays the cursor position in the lower right corner of the vim window: The Ctrl-U command scrolls down half a screen of text. Unfortunately, the window resizing commands require quite a bit of typing. Others can be downloaded from the official vim website, https://vim.sourceforge.io/. vim doesn't have a ":funny" command, otherwise ":fun" would be confusing too. The general form is: This is similar to the ":substitute" command. You can type: 'y' to substitute this match 'n' to skip this match to skip this match 'a' to substitute this and all remaining matches {not in Vi} 'q' to quit substituting {not in Vi} CTRL-E to scroll the screen up {not in Vi} CTRL-Y to scroll the screen down {not in Vi}. You can prepend a count: "3*" searches for the third occurrence of the word under the cursor. Many options have a short and a long name. You can't see them, it's just a position that vim remembers. The command to start vi and open a file is straight forward. If any of the windows contain changes, vim will not exit. That's because vim knows that you probably don't want to delete the first character of a word. Delete character under the cursor (short for ", Delete character before the cursor (short for ", Delete from cursor to end of line (short for ". Without a range, it writes the whole file. If you type ":edit i" and there are files "info.txt" and "info_backup.txt" you will get ":edit info". 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