vi – the powerful Linux/Unix text editor

We will talk about some vi stuff today:

Some fun first–>
1) <a href="http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=664">http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=664
2) help 42

Ok, coming to serious things-
References:
3) Linux cheat sheet:
<a href="http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi2.html">http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi2.html
4) <a href="http://www.venukb.com/2007/01/28/vivim-graphical-cheat-sheet/">http://www.venukb.com/2007/01/28/vivim-graphical-cheat-sheet/
5) <a href="http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html#commands">http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html#commands

Commands and tips:
6) Something that is difficult to find on the net is : how to create a numbered list in vi/vim? Simple, we will use macro's
To do this:
a> type number and terminatory ex: 1)
b> start recording using qa  . This will record the macro in a.
c> yank the line with yy
d> goto next line
e> press a to increment the number
f> End the macro recording with q
g> Play the macro with numner of times to repeat the actions. Example press 11@a
7) For repeating the last command you can use
8) You can put your vim settings in ~/vimrc and this can containg things like "set nu" and any other configuration.
9) Adding date in vi : :r! date
10) There is a variant of vi known as elvis which is quite nice
11) Similarly for viewing binary file there is a variant called bvi

change the window in split screen.

I use the split screen in vim very in-frequently, so I did not really know how to move from one screen to the other. There is also very little or no documentation that I found on this on the first page of google, so here it is :
press &#8221;ctrl+w and ctrl + w&#8221; to change to other window.

If you are not sure how to get the split screen, then you can type help split in vim to get the help on split screen.

bash script to change vim colorscheme based on the available themes

Here&#8217;s one script that you may find useful. A little variation or wrapper for this script can make your life colorful 🙂

You can write a wrapper to this to take one of the inputs randomly and then use it in alias to start <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">vim.

using paragraph seperator in vi – the easy way

imap aa 80i-io

Just put this in the vimrc or in a vi session with a : in normal mode.

Explanation:

This will map the key &#8221;aa&#8221; to the sequence which will add &#8221;-&#8221; 80 times in the current line and then go to new line in insert mode. This is quite simple so any changes required should be simple enough to make.

vim understanding the various modes and using the yanking more efficiently.

We will look at the vim modes today. Sometime back , I was looking at copying a function body. So I was basically looking to copy the lines till matching &#8221;}&#8221;. I found a plugin called <a href="http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1234" target="_blank">yankring which would allow me to yank the text in various combinations. So I can copy a function by going to the begining of the function and then &#8221;y}&#8221;. That is very simple to understand right? Wrong!!!

vim scripts and tips

Here are few of the links for vim that you can use. It consists of the link to vimrc, colorscheme, syntaxcomplete and zzsplash.
<a href="http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/vimrc">http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/vimrc
<a href="http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/almost-default.vim">http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/almost-default.vim
<a href="http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/syntaxcomplete.vim">http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/syntaxcomplete.vim
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