Jump start your vi editing

Windows network administrators have long used Edit, Notepad, or Wordpad to edit large text and script files. Most UNIX systems have an editor of some sort; the actual utility varies depending on the flavor of UNIX you're running. Some, like Sun Microsystems, even have full-blown competitors to Microsoft Word. But, all UNIX machines have vi—the visual editor. Once you know your way around vi, you can edit files on any flavor of UNIX, including Linux.

What's vi?
At first glance, vi appears to be anything but visual. It is, however, a very powerful editor, and it can do anything you need. It allows you to edit and see your entire document as you work. Many prior UNIX editors, such as ed, were line-oriented editors, where you only saw one line of text at a time. So, vi is considerably more visual than past UNIX editor options.

Combined with several other command line utilities available on most UNIX systems, such as nroff and troff, it is possible to produce documents with as many formatting changes and styles as any Microsoft Word document. In fact, I actually produced many of my graduate school papers using these utilities.

You don't have to worry about going through any special installation routines to get vi on your system. It should be there when the system is installed, because system administrators need vi to do most of their work, including creating system scripts. Redhat Linux does give you the option of installing or not installing particular editors on a system, but the chances of finding a UNIX system without vi is still small.

Author's note
This article is based on the vi version found in Solaris 7. Even though I'll be discussing a specific version of vi, everything discussed here should work fine in any flavor of vi, including the version that comes with the MKS Toolkit for Windows.

Using vi
Before I get into how to use vi, it's important to understand that there are two basic modes for vi: insert mode and command mode. Insert mode is the mode where you type and things appear on the screen. Command mode is the mode where you type and things happen, instead of text appearing. The easiest way to think of command mode is to think of what happens when you cut, copy, and paste data.

By default, vi starts up in command mode, so no text will be entered when you type, unless you choose one of the commands to take you into insert mode. Most vi commands don't show anything on the screen—you just have to know how they work. To switch between insert and command modes, use the [Esc] key. If you're already in command mode, using [Esc] will indicate to vi that you have finished your command and it will attempt to execute the command. If you have not typed a command, pressing [Esc] in command mode will simply ring the terminal bell.

Now that I've discussed the modes vi operates in, you can start to use it. To start, open a terminal window on your workstation. You can start the editor by simply typing vi at the $ prompt and pressing [Enter].

You'll then see a blank document appear, filled with ~ characters down the left side of the page. It doesn't look terribly visual, but those ~ characters you see are just the indication of the bottom of the file. They will not show up in the file when you save it.

To edit a specific document or to give a blank document a name, you can also type vi filename, where filename is an existing file or the name you want the new file to have.