Learning the vi editor
by drjI have been browsing the nvi sources and Keith Bostic (principal author)
makes a couple of references to
Learning the vi Editor by Linda Lamb.
I can’t remember if i knew this book in the 1990s when it came out and
when i was learning vi, but i wish i got a copy back then.
I’m reviewing the 5th edition, and for this book it matters. After the 5th edition the book got renamed Learning the vi and Vim editors, got a lot thicker, and added lots of distracting content about Vim. Vim is not vi.
The short version is that this edition is awesome and if you are serious about vi you should try and at least read a copy.
It’s a small book at 206 pages, and, perhaps in recognition of that, features a Tarsius on the cover (what? not a Lamb?); it’s very cute. The pace is good, a reasoned and gentle introduction to basic editing, before ramping up to more advanced tasks, uses of ex (the underling line editor), and then spiralling out into orbit with scripting and automation (and incidentally, a concise but very practical introduction to shell scripting). As the book itself proclaims, you could stop after the first 2 (or 3) chapters and be reasonably proficient with vi on the daily. The book is there and ready when you are curious to learn more.
It was this sort of book that laid out the backbone of what was to become O’Reilly’s dominance in the technical book market for practising Unix professionals. Clear layout with impeccable technical experts and writers making both tutorial and reference content (both in one volume for vi). Also physically well made and with a cute animal on the cover; the copy i have now must be 30 years old, and although it has the glued perfect binding, it still lies flat without cracking.
There is a handy reference section at the end. The 5th edition also comes with a glossy 3-panel folded reference card which is attached in a perforated insert at the back (luckily my second hand copy still has it attached, and i haven’t dared tear it out either). The tear-out car seems to largely repeat the reference section in the main body, but is slightly more accurate and comprehensive.
One minor niggle is that programmers might not find the small and useful section about lisp-mode, indentation, and ctags. It is squirreled away at the back of the last chapter, and while it is signposted earlier, it is easy to miss. Programmers should skim the end of the last chapter after finishing chapter 2.
A little more detail
Chapter 1 — The vi Text Editor — introduces vi as a Unix command:
how to start, how to quit, and a few troubleshooting checklists to consult
if things don’t seem to be working (the checklists continue in the rest of
the book and often contain hidden nuggets).
Chapter 2 — Simple Editing — is where the real work beings. Actually editing
files with vi. h j k l c d i all of that.
The pace is slow and careful, and illustrates many of the commands with
before- and after-diagrams showing how the cursor moves and text changes.
The next two chapters are Moving Around in a Hurry and Beyond the Basics;
while they are not critical for editing using vi i highly recommend them
(and they are shorter than the first 2 chapters).
They cover searching (without using regular expressions,
which are covered later), other movement commands (like z and H which
are some of my favourites), and marking and buffers.
You could stop there and declare yourself a competent vi user, but the book, like vi itself, tempts you onwards to learn more powerful techniques.
Chapter 5 is Introducing the ex editor; ex while technically a different editor is also technically part of vi: you can use ex from vi and you can use vi from ex. A lot of this chapter is moving blocks of text around and into and from other files. One part of ex, global replacement, is so powerful that its treatment has the whole of the following chapter.
Chapter 6 — Global Replacement — is for the g and s commands
in ex; it also features regular expressions fairly extensively.
The chapters are getting quite long now, and a lot of the
material here is definitely expert stuff.
One of the best bits is several pages of extended examples,
which are a very diverse set of small snippets that do
useful things.
Some of them are classics and some of them have been made
classics by this book.
My fave is :v/./d to delete all blank lines (my version
is actually one character shorter than the one given in the book).
Chapter 7 — Advanced Editing — is the final and longest chapter (over
30 pages of reference material follow though) and is
somewhat miscellaneous.
How to add custom commands and keyboard mappings to vi,
and how to script with ex i consider as fairly esoteric; but
using Unix filters, like !}fmt to run the next paragraph through
the Unix utility fmt, is fairly fun and within ordinary competence.
This is also where the section for editing program source code appears.
The Historical Perspective
The 5th edition was published in 1990 and i am reading the 1994 revision of that. That’s over 30 years ago. How much is still relevant?
Well, basically everything except about half of the last chapter, very definitely still relevant. Every now and then there is a bit of discussion of using slow (300 baud) dial-up terminals, or types of terminal that were obsolete even in 1990. That stuff is not so relevant.
A lot of the material for the more advanced sections is based around document preparation using troff, the tradition Unix typesetting system that was used to prepare this book. It helps if you know a bit of troff (which i do), but i doubt there are many people still writing new documents in troff macro packages, love letters aside. So maybe the typical reader in the 21st century does not feel motivated by these troff sections, and also slightly bewildered at seeing troff syntax, which has very 1979 vibes.
I feel that parts of the book have been left behind.
People don’t maintain little address books using vi
in plain text files.
They don’t have vi scripts that convert troff sources
to indexes.
The task of personalising the computing platform we use,
has been taking over by
scripts written in Perl or Python or
has been swallowed up by little apps and webpages.
One of the examples, more sketched than fully developed,
uses diff’s ed mode (also compatible with ex)
to create a series of versions of a file.
Version control by-hand if you like.
This is a nice example of more powerful scripting using vi and
other Unix tools, but even in 1990 the overall motivation is weak:
The version control systems SCCS and RCS were available, although
possibly not available on every Unix system because of
licensing issues (perhaps that in fact motivates the idea of
managing versions using ad-hoc scripts: SCCS wasn’t installed
on your Unix).
Closing notes
Probably still the best reference on vi all in one place.
Users of more recent “clones” will probably be surprised by
what vi could do (and still can, if you can find it).
Also great if you like the way all Unix textbooks used to be
in Helvetica and Times New Roman.
By the way, i prepared this review and researched the examples
in the book using nvi2 which appears to be an entirely
adequate replacement for vi.
I have a few notes on alternatives to vim
in the previous blog entry (Vim is itself a putative successor to vi).