30.2 What We Cover

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 .