Emergency vi (vi tutorial)

Xah Lee, 2005-10, …, 2012-01-01

This page is a basic tutorial for vi or vim.

vi is one of unix's fuckup. Sometimes in a emergency situation you are forced to deal with vi, and fucking unix admins refuse to install emacs. Here's your help:

• To open a file named “myfile.txt”, type in the shell prompt: vi myfile.txt
• To quit without saving, press: 【Esc : q ! Enter】
• To save current file, press: 【Esc : w Enter】
• To quit vi, type: 【Esc : q Enter】

• Use arrow keys to move the cursor.

• page up: 【Ctrl+f】
• page down: 【Ctrl+b】

To insert text, move your cursor to the right place, then press i, then type your text. After you are done, type Esc to exit the insertion mode.

To delete text, move cursor to the right place and press x. (if x is inserted, that means you forgot to exit the insert mode. Type Esc to exit insertion mode. Type u to undo.)

When something doesn't work, or if you accidentally typed something and have no idea what is going on, try press Esc, then type u for undo. If a cat jumped onto your keyboard and you cannot exit vi, type the shell suspend command 【Ctrl+z】, which should get you back on the unix command prompt, then you can kill. (by first find out the pid by ps auwwx | grep vi, then kill -9 ‹pid›).

Congratulation! You've learned emergency vi.

It may be confusing, but with the above you can edit any text files with vi.

Basic vi Commands

Remember, in vi, it has modes. At any one time, you are either in command mode or text insertion mode. To go to the command mode, just press Esc. To go into editing mode, press i.

Go To Insertion Mode

Undo and Redo

Cursor Movement

Deleting Text

Copy And Paste

Note that when you delete a word or many words, the word is automatically put into the clipboard.

Search And Replace

Syntax Coloring

Line Numbers