Vi, Vim, Vscode editors

VI or VIM

This section describes both editors however these days vi command is an alias to vim. Therefore bear in mind although all have been tested the test itself was made on VIM.

drop to bash

:!bash   or   :!sh

edit other file

:e file.txt    #autocomplite works

redirect command STDOUT to the current edited file in the cursor position

:r!dir

show line number

:set number    or  :set nu

find and replace in VI called substitute (ref. sed)

:%s/wily/trusty/g    #substitute all wily with trusty in all document
:s/wily/trusty/g     #substitute only in the current line

find and print only lines that match the search

:g/string-to-search/p       #   :g -global search,  /p -print out on a screen

Undo and redo

 u -undo last change
 Ctrl-R -redo changes which were undone (undo the undos). '.' to repeat a previous change, at the current cursor position

Visual mode

v -visual selection using arrows and navigation keys
^v -visual block selection, y-yank, d-delete, i-insert still work

Multi-line insert in visual block selection

Press I to start a special form of insert mode, then type the wanted text (s:). When you press Esc to exit from insert mode, the text will be inserted in the same position on each of the lines affected by the visual block selection.

Insert comments sign # at the begging each line between 10 and 12th line

:set number
:10,12s/^/#

Wrap text

:set wrap    or    :set nowrap

Show current file name

Ctrl+g    -shows the current file name
1, Ctrl+g -shows relative to vim full path. Press '1' then Ctrl+g

VIM only

Split windows, multiple windows

:split   or   :vsplit
C^w, c -close current window
C^w, C^w - switch between windows

Change colour of dark blue comments

You can do it manually with the command below, where ABCDEF is an appropriate colour hex code.

:hi Comment guifg=#ABCDEF

To make it permanent, add these lines to your ~/.vimrc file (using green as an example):

syntax on
:highlight Comment ctermfg=green

Oneliner

echo "syntax on" >> ~/.vimrc && echo ":highlight Comment ctermfg=green" >> ~/.vimrc

Vimdiff - diff compare

Compare multiple files using Screen program widows like

vimdiff -d file1 file2

Comparison tools

user@server1:/etc/cups# sdiff cupsd.conf -RE cupsd.conf     #side-by-side merge of file differences
LogLevel debug                                                  LogLevel debug
MaxLogSize 0                                                    MaxLogSize 0
# Allow remote access                                           # Allow remote access
Port 631                                                        Port 631
Listen /var/run/cups/cups.sock                                  Listen /var/run/cups/cups.sock

Another tools:

• colourdiff - this takes the standard diff options like -y for side-by-side compare