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.
So isn’t the O’Reilly book
“So isn’t?” Do you mean “so is?” No matter how often I hear that I will never get used to it.
Ack, it’s contagious.
I never got that phrase either. Kind of like, “I could care less.” It’s backwards.