The articles in this chapter show you how to get the most for your money from vi and ex . If you've been using vi for a while, you may already know a lot of these things - but take a quick look at this list of topics to see if there's anything new to you:
Travel between files, save text into buffers, and move it around without leaving vi : articles 30.4 , 30.5 , and 30.7 .
Recover deletions from up to nine numbered buffers: article 30.8 .
Do global search and replacement with pattern matching: articles 30.9 , 30.14 , 30.15 , 30.17 , and 30.27 .
Save a lot of typing with word abbreviations: articles 30.31 , 30.32 , and 30.33 .
"Prettify" lines of text that don't fit on the screen the way you want them to: article 30.37 .
Run other UNIX commands without leaving vi (called a filter-through): articles 30.22 , 30.23 , and 30.26 .
Keep track of functions and included files with ctags and tags : articles 30.28 and 30.29 .
Change your vi and ex options in your .exrc file for all files or just for files in a local directory: articles 30.6 and 30.18 .
When you type a
:
(colon) command in
vi
, you're beginning an
ex
command. There's more information about
ex
in a later chapter: articles
33.3
,
33.4
, and
33.5
.
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