Learning the vi and Vim Editors (Paperback)

by Arnold Robbins (Author), Elbert Hannah (Author), Linda Lamb (Author)
Key Phrases: outline mode, simple edits, buffer list, Keystrokes Results, Command Function, Quickfix List (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
There's nothing that hard-core Unix and Linux users are more fanatical about than their text editor. Editors are the subject of adoration and worship, or of scorn and ridicule, depending upon whether the topic of discussion is your editor or someone else's. vi has been the standard editor for close to 30 years. Popular on Unix and Linux, it has a growing following on Windows systems, too. Most experienced system administrators cite vi as their tool of choice. And since 1986, this book has been the guide for vi. However, Unix systems are not what they were 30 years ago, and neither is this book. While retaining all the valuable features of previous editions, the 7th edition of Learning the vi and vim Editors has been expanded to include detailed information on vim, the leading vi clone. vim is the default version of vi on most Linux systems and on Mac OS X, and is available for many other operating systems too. With this guide, you learn text editing basics and advanced tools for both editors, such as multi-window editing, how to write both interactive macros and scripts to extend the editor, and power tools for programmers -- all in the easy-to-follow style that has made this book a classic. Learning the vi and vim Editors includes: A complete introduction to text editing with vi: How to move around vi in a hurry Beyond the basics, such as using buffers vi's global search and replacement Advanced editing, including customizing vi and executing Unix commands How to make full use of vim: Extended text objects and more powerful regular expressions Multi-window editing and powerful vim scripts How to make full use of the GUI version of vim, called gvim vim's enhancements for programmers, such as syntax highlighting, folding and extended tags Coverage of three other popular vi clones -- nvi, elvis, and vile -- is also included. You'll find several valuable appendixes, including an alphabetical quick reference to both vi and ex mode commands for regular vi and for vim, plus an updated appendix on vi and the Internet. Learning either vi or vim is required knowledge if you use Linux or Unix, and in either case, reading this book is essential. After reading this book, the choice of editor will be obvious for you too.

About the Author
Arnold Robbins is a professional programmer and technical author who's been working with various Unix systems since 1980, and with GNU/Linux systems since 1996. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for awk. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation.

A software engineer at Intel, Arnold is the author and/or coauthor of several bestselling titles from O'Reilly, including Unix In A Nutshell, Effective awk Programming, sed & awk, and Classic Shell Scripting.

Elbert is a professional software engineer and software architect recently finishing a 21-year career in the telcom industry. He wrote a full screen editor in assembler in 1983 as his first professional assignment, and has had special interest in editors since. He loves connecting Unix to anything and once wrote a stream editor program to automate JCL edits for mainframe monthly configurations by streaming mainframe JCL to a stream editor on an RJE connected Unix box.

Linda Lamb is a former employee of O'Reilly Media, where she worked in various capacities, including technical writer, editor of technical books, and marketing manager. She also worked on O'Reilly's series of consumer health books, Patient Centered Guides.

Product Details

• Paperback: 492 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 7 edition (July 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059652983X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596529833
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #43,965 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An updated version of a very useful and well-written little book, August 3, 2008

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

vi, like many of the utilities developed during the early years of Unix, has a reputation for being hard to navigate. Bram Moolenaar's enhanced clone, Vim ("vi Improved"), has gone a long way toward removing reasons for such impressions. Vim includes many conveniences, visual guides, and help screens. It has become possibly the most popular version of vi, so this seventh edition of this book devotes seven new chapters to it in Part 2. However, many other worthy clones of vi also exist and they are covered in part 3.

The first two chapters present some simple vi commands with which you can get started. Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on easier ways to do tasks. Chapters 5 through 7 provide tools that help you shift more of the editing burden to the computer. They introduce you to the ex line editor underlying vi, and they show you how to issue ex commands from within vi.

Chapter 8, provides an introduction to the extensions available in the four vi clones covered in this book. It centralizes in one place the descriptions of multiwindow editing, GUI interfaces, extended regular expressions, facilities that make editing easier, and several other features, providing a roadmap to what follows in the rest of this book. It also provides a pointer to source code for the original vi, which can be compiled easily on modern Unix systems, including Linux.

Part 2 describes Vim, the most popular vi clone. Chapter 9, provides a general introduction to Vim, including where to get binary versions for popular operating systems and some of the different ways to use Vim. Chapter 10 describes the major improvements in Vim, such as built-in help, control over initialization, additional motion commands, and extended regular expressions. Chapter 11, focuses on multiwindow editing, which is perhaps the most significant additional feature over standard vi. This chapter provides all the details on creating and using multiple windows.

Chapter 12, looks into the Vim command language, which lets you write scripts to customize and tailor Vim to suit your needs. Much of Vim's ease of use comes from the large number of scripts that other users have already written and contributed to the Vim distribution. Chapter 13 looks at Vim in modern GUI environments. Chapter 14 focuses on Vim's use as a programmer's editor, above and beyond its facilities for general text editing. Of particular value are the folding and outlining facilities, smart indenting, syntax highlighting, and edit-compile-debug cycle speedups. Chapter 15, is a bit of a catch-all chapter, covering a number of interesting points that don't fit into the earlier chapters.

Part 3 describes three other popular vi clones: nvi, elvis, and vile. Chapters 16 through 18 cover these clones and show you how to use them, discussing the features that are specific to each one.

Part 4 provides useful reference material. Appendix A lists all vi and ex commands, sorted by function. It also provides an alphabetical list of ex commands. Selected vi and ex commands from Vim are also included. Appendix B lists set command options for vi and for all four clones. Appendix C consolidates checklists found earlier in the book. Appendix D describes vi's place in the larger Unix and Internet culture.

vi and its clones may seem like backwards tools in the 21st century, but at a very low level of operation, it may be all you have. It is good to understand it or at least have a reference where you can get up to speed quickly if you need to do so. You may say this is only something system admins need to know, but at one time or another we all turn into system administrators at some level. Also, vi is one of the few editing tools you can count on to be on every Unix system. You cannot say the same of dtpad (most commonly on Sun workstations) or nedit (common on SGI and Sun workstations). Sometimes you have to trade ubiquity for intuitiveness, and in the case of Unix editors, this is one of those times.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's all about power and control, September 4, 2008

By	Anthony Lawrence "Unix, Linux and Mac OS X" (Middleboro, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read this with both joy and sadness. Joy because it's a great treatment of vi and its clones, but sadness because so few will appreciate it.

Nowadays it's mostly programmers who understand the value of a text editor as opposed to a word processor. For the rest of the world, any text editor is just a clumsy, difficult beast that seems to belong in another era. Ordinary computer users just don't grok text editors.

Yet I use vi every day. Yes, for writing programs and scripts, but also for creating HTML files and anything else I need to store away. Why I use it for HTML is obvious to any programmer: advanced editing is just as apt to be needed there as in program text. But again, the average person, even those who write raw HTML, just doesn't understand that.

They miss out on so much. Tasks that I can do in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds, will have them bumbling along for minutes or worse. Sometimes their word processor or HTML editor can help them a little, but none of those tools have any fraction of the power that vi offers.

Even for "ordinary" files, lists, records and the like, I tend to use vi where most folks would automatically turn to a spreadsheet or database. I can easily import my raw data into those other tools if I need to, but it's much easier to work on the data in text form. Vi gives me the power to do mass changes that would always be clumsy in any other tool.

That's what it is about: power and control. Efficiency. Speed. If you understand even part of what I'm talking about, you'll want this book. As for the rest of you.. well, I feel sorry for you. You have no idea what you are missing.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Vi/Vim Book on the Market, September 16, 2008

By	Michael Schilli (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This new edition goes above and beyond of what's currently available in the area of Vi/Vim tutorials.

It is fascinating to watch how much time and typing a programmer can save every single day, once they've figured out how to use a tool like Vim efficiently. Many people just know 5% of what an editor is capable of, and day-in and day-out they're using way too many keystrokes. What a waste of time and what a strain on your hands!

"vi and vim" 7th edition (make sure to get the latest, not the previous one) explains how to make the most out of this editor. By the way, you should always use "vim", not the legacy "vi" editor, which is a waste of time as it lacks important features. Luckily "vim" is standard on many systems like Linux nowadays, and even if you type "vi" there, you'll get the better "vim" automatically.

Learning shortcuts for common editing tasks like block indentation, text formatting, or screen movement is essential for fast typing, and the challenge is to keep the shortcuts all memorized. Vim isn't your father's editor, it has literally thousands of keystroke combinations, and if you don't have a system to memorize them, you'll never use them. Luckily, "vi and vim" 7th edition explains them all in detail and in a way that makes it easier to recall them later when you need them.

The book gives mnemonics whenever possible and it explains concepts like vim's combination of action and move commands in a way that lets you understand the concept behind these commands instead of simply having to memorize nonsensical keystrokes.

There's some chapters which I consider fluff, but I guess there is people out there using odd vi incarnations like "elvis" or "gvim", so the authors felt like they were worth to be covered as well.

It would be great if the chapter on programming vim with its own scripting language (and possibly other languages like Perl) could be expanded and information on how to define complicated macros or write your own plugins would also be helpful. But I guess that's too much for a "Learning the vi and vim editors" book and maybe there's an upcoming "Mastering" book, who knows?

This book is a must-read for every programmer using the 'vi' line of editors. There's two other vim books out there, but they don't come even close in terms of depth and content structuring. Five stars for the 7th edition!