Learning the vi and Vim Editors

Book Preface

Text editing is one of the most common tasks on any computer system, and vi is one of the most useful standard text editors on a system. With vi you can create new files or edit any existing text-only file.

vi, like many of the classic utilities developed during the early years of Unix, has a reputation for being hard to navigate. Bram Moolenaar’s enhanced clone, Vim (“vi Improved”), has gone a long way toward removing reasons for such impressions. Vim includes countless conveniences, visual guides, and help screens. It has become probably the most popular version of vi, so this seventh edition of this book devotes seven new chapters to it in Part II, Vim. However, many other worthy clones of vi also exist; we cover three of them in Part III, Other vi Clones.