Learning VIM gently

VI has been around for a long time. While there are many GUI text editors like gedit: vi and vim remain popular with system administrators as most of you must edit configuration files for example in /etc. It is a good tool for documentation as you will discover in this book. Also, you don’t need a graphical interface and may invoke vi or vim over a network using ssh or even the much-maligned telnet command and it is quite lightweight on your resources as well.
VIM is a worthy successor to VI – Unix’s ubiquitous text editor. VI has limited functionalities as compared to VIM and is limited to Linux/UNIX whereas VIM has been ported to almost all major Operating Systems like OS/2, all distributable of Linux etc. You can say VIM is a modern version of VI.


Content
Introduction to VI and VIM
Installation of VIM on Ubuntu
Working with VIM
Navigation commands
Command w
Command b
To go to the end of the line and then beginning of the line
To go to the middle and lower end of the screen
To go to the end and beginning of the file.
Editing commands
Deleting one character using x
Deleting a whole word using dw command
Deleting a whole line using the dd command
Redo command
Additional Editing commands
Copying and Pasting
Using the y command in Visual mode
Substitution command
Command-line mode commands
Forward slash / for searching
Question mark ? for searching
Graphical mode of VIM
Using System commands from vim
Running a command from the vim session
Advanced features of vim