If you’re cool like me, you spend a decent amount of time in vi editing files. Despite all the fancy IDEs and the like, nothing beats uploading your PHP script to the webserver and editing in place. I don’t profess to be a vi expert. I’m far from it, in fact. But for those that are like me–comfortable working in it but far from being a master–here are a few tips:

• Typing “G” (in command mode, but not as a : command!) takes you to the last line of the file.
• ma, where a is a letter a-z, sets a as a ‘mark’. You can then issue commands reflecting that mark. For example, I wanted to delete about 500 lines from a file. But I didn’t know how many lines there were, so “500dd” wasn’t a viable option. In my case, I marked the last line I wanted to delete with a, went up to the first line I wanted to delete, and then typed d’a to delete from the current line to mark a. Note that, as you’re doing this, there’s no indication of it.
• . (a single period) runs the last command again. Handy way more often than I’d expect!
• :wq is probably the most well-known command. But ZZ (not :ZZ) is easier and does the same thing!

This is a handy reference, by the way. So isn’t the O’Reilly book, but you can’t Google your way through that.

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