O'Reilly - Learning the vi and Vim Editors

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.

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