Absolute Essentials You Need to Know to Survive Vi Editor

You could enter this mode by pressing the letter:Among all the terminal based text editors, I prefer the Vi ecosystem.

vi your_file.txt

Table of Contents

• 1 Vi modes
• 2 Why you should learn Vi?
• 3 Launch Vi
  • 3.1 Using Normal mode in Vi
• 4 Conclusion
  • 4.1 Author Info

Vi modes

It was developed in 1976 by Bill Joy as a visual mode of the ex line editor, also cowritten by Bill Joy.

Why you should learn Vi?

You could enter this mode by pressing the letter i in Normal Mode and start typing whatever you want.

1. Vi/Vim is free and open source. And remember this is it’s foss!!
2. Vi is always available since it’s required by POSIX.
3. Vi/Vim is well documented. And it also has its own user manual; you only need to type :h in command mode. I’ll discuss command mode later in this guide.
4. Vi/Vim has a lot of plugins. Vim Awesome is one of the most popular websites to download extensions.
5. It does not consume a lot of system resources, and you could do a lot of tasks, even write novels in Vim.

Launch Vi

💡This is the default mode when VI/Vim opens.💡

• Normal or command mode: This is the mode you use for navigating and copy-pasting
• Insert mode: This is the editing mode where you actually type text

Using Normal mode in Vi

📋The Normal mode is used for actions like navigation, copy, paste, delete, text substitution (not editing), etc. You always could go back to this mode by pressing <Esc>.Did you know Vi is tiny, with just 160 kB in size?Here are five reasons why I recommend learning Vi and Vim:

Conclusion

It is not uncommon for some distributions to replace Vi with Vim. Even if you are using Vi commands, it runs Vim. Vim (VI Improved) it’s a free and open-source clone of Stevie (ST Editor for VI Enthusiasts), developed in 1991 by Bram Moolenaar. It has a huge number of extensions.Other common Vi commands you can use in normal/command mode:

vi

VI/Vim is omnipresent in Unix-like operating systems due to its POSIX syntax, and when you invest a little time to unwrap its real power, you could master one of the best text-editor.

Author Info

In fact, this is not a different mode (that’s why parentheses are used), but it’s important to separate it because it’s where you could type orders and commands