Linux, Inside vi - Editor modes of operation

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Inside vi - Editor modes of operation

The visual editor, more commonly known as vi (pronounced “vee eye”) is a very powerful text editor, created especially for those who are touch typists. While the editor is quite powerful, many a newbie complains that its’ commands are difficult to learn and cumbersome to use. You must realize that vi was invented long before the introduction of the Windows environment and provided powerful features for administrators and programmers using Unix command line environments.

In this chapter we will show you how to use the vi text editor to create and modify Linux shell scripts. We will also review how to mark the script files as executable programs.

We have chosen to demonstrate vi because it is included within all Linux distributions. Those more familiar with Windows environments may find it more convenient and intuitive to use a GUI editor if Gnome or KDE environments are available on your Linux server.

For all intents and purposes you can consider that the vi editor operates in two modes; command mode and insert mode. When you first invoke vi you will be in command mode. Whenever you are in insert mode, you can return to command mode by pressing the escape (esc) key.

Commands within vi are case sensitive. Keeping that in mind, we will see that a lower case a for instance, performs differently than an upper case A.

Starting vi

In order to start vi from the Linux command prompt, just type vi followed by the name of the new file you’d like to create or the name of an existing file you’d like to edit. If you are editing a new file, you will be presented with a screen with a column of tildes (~) as shown in the following example. This indicates that you are editing an empty file.

vi display for an empty file

~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
"empty.fil" [New File]

Exiting vi

As indicated above, to save the file and exit vi we use the :wq command, but what if we’ve made a mess of things and just want to exit vi without writing the file to disk? To exit without first saving the file, use the :q! command. Using just the :q command will prompt you to save the file, so don’t forget to place the bang character (!) or exclamation point at the end of the command.

The above book excerpt is from:

Easy Linux Commands
Working Examples of Linux Command Syntax

ISBN: 0-9759135-0-6

Terry Clark

http://www.rampant-books.com/book_2005_1_linux_commands.htm

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