VI Tips

[problem]

Started using vi probably 13 years ago and ever so often, still learn new tricks with it! 🙂

Some of my favorites are: turning on control characters; mapping function keys; performing global search and replace; remapping columns.

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[solution]

So to the basics, editing a file:


vi filename

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[example]

Editing a file from a specific line number or pattern:


vi +lineno filename
vi +/patt/ filename

To turn on control characters, once in vi – do the following (exactly)


:set list

To turn it off again:


:set nolist

Global replace:


:%s/patt/rep/g

Map function keys:


:map #1 :w![ctrl v ctrl m]

that is type colon,map,#,1,space,colon,w,!,^M then hit enter. More on this later.

Remap columns:


:%s/(col1patt) (col2patt)/2 1/

To finish here is a cool but slightly bizarre one:


:g/^/m0

It reverses the lines of file. Effectively it says – global (all lines) with this pattern (a beginning line – so all lines), move to 0 – which is shorthand for the current line. So as vi applies the command to each line, it bubbles up to the top.

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[reference]

[tags]vim, regular expression, Unix Coding School[/tags]

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