30.2 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 30.4, 30.5, and 30.7.

• Recover deletions from up to nine numbered buffers: article 30.8.

• Do global search and replacement with pattern matching: articles 30.9, 30.14, 30.15, 30.17, and 30.27.

• Save a lot of typing with word abbreviations: articles 30.31, 30.32, and 30.33.

• "Prettify" lines of text that don't fit on the screen the way you want them to: article 30.37.

• Run other UNIX commands without leaving vi (called a filter-through): articles 30.22, 30.23, and 30.26.

• Keep track of functions and included files with ctags and tags: articles 30.28 and 30.29.

• Change your vi and ex options in your .exrc file for all files or just for files in a local directory: articles 30.6 and 30.18.

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 33.3, 33.4, and 33.5.