What We Cover

The articles in this chapter show you how to get the most for your money from vi and ex. If you've been using vi for a while, you may already know a lot of these things - but take a quick look at this list of topics to see if there's anything new to you:

• Travel between files, save text into buffers, and move it around without leaving vi: articles , , and .
• Recover deletions from up to nine numbered buffers: article .
• Do global search and replacement with pattern matching: articles , , , , and .
• Save a lot of typing with word abbreviations: articles , , and .
• "Prettify" lines of text that don't fit on the screen the way you want them to: article .
• Run other UNIX commands without leaving vi (called a filter-through): articles , , and .
• Keep track of functions and included files with ctags and tags: articles and .
• Change your vi and ex options in your exrc file for all files or just for files in a local directory: articles and .

When you type a : (colon) command in vi, you're beginning an ex command. There's more information about ex in a later chapter: articles , , and .

- EK