Comments on: notepad.exe vs vi: Which Is More Difficult To Learn? The Answer Isn’t Quite What You Expect.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:27:47 +0000

Ok, I’m a unix systems administrator, and have been using vi for a long time, but even I have to say that this article is extremely biased. Notepad is by far easier to use, and definitely to learn.

I don’t use it often, but when the situation calls for it, notepad has the option to use this thing called a mouse. If nothing else, this alone wins the contest for notepad.

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:38:27 +0000

This is all good info, but I think that saying notepad is complicated because it has a lot of shortcut keys is oversimplifying a bit. I recognize most of those notepad commands, and they are pretty much all universal to most windows applications. If you know the word commands, then you know the notepad commands, etc. I haven’t used Linux much recently, but it seems that a lot of these same commands work there in the GUI apps as well? Also, as you mentioned you don’t have to use the keyboard commands in notepad, it just speeds things up, so if you forget one, you can find it in the menus. And a lot of the menu items tell you their keyboard shortcuts, so if you can find it in the menu, you can teach yourself the commands as you go. vi/vim may be more powerful, but for normal text editing, I don’t really think it is any simpler than notepad, especially the learning curve.

By: Ronald Duncan

Ronald Duncan — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:34:23 +0000

Sorry angle brackets got removed to leave
:,s which is junk.

With the ex commands it is :lineno,linenoCommand

e.g.
search
:5,8s/findit/replace/
or
All lines are
:%s/findit/replace

using g (global) to delete all matching lines
:%g/findit/d
or to yank all matching lines
:%g/findit/y

There is one area where vi is better than vim and that is on very large files. vi does not try and load the file it just takes the first small section, so it is very fast at editing massive files.

By: Ronald Duncan

Ronald Duncan — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:25:59 +0000

The best way to learn vi is to install vim on your windows machine and go through the vim tutorial.

I first learnt vi through man vi and it was a nightmare. I decided to try again after playing with Elite after a 20 year break and finding that the keyboard was just so much faster than a joy stick.

When it comes to editing vi/vim is so much faster than a keyboard and mouse.

Using the vim tutorial was a pleasure and so much easier than trying to figure things out from man vi

There are a few errors in your list.

Cut is d (delete)
Copy is y (yank)

The keyboard cheat sheet is great, but I still recommend running through the vim tutorial. It is a quick fun way of learning vi.

It really is worth it, and once you have managed to get into the switch between normal, command and insert mode. You become so much more productive than with any other editor.

Because you often want to do things with a number of lines you need to be able to toggle line numbering.

:se nu // :set number turns on line nos
:se nonu // :set nonumber turns off line nos

:the ex commands are incredibly powerful and

q: gives you a command history editor in vim

The key ex commands are

:,s/findit/replacewith/gi
It is a great way of learning regular expressions and
/findit is the way to test them in vim

:,g/findit/set of commands to apply to selection

By: cimo

cimo — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:36:55 +0000

ggVG -> Select All
:%y* -> copy all lines to system clipboard

By: vi keyboard cheatsheet « Ubuntu Life

vi keyboard cheatsheet « Ubuntu Life — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:29:17 +0000

[...] Enlace | Notepad vs vi [...]

By: Wayne

Wayne — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:07:59 +0000

Great tip lelutin!

By: lelutin

lelutin — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:45:10 +0000

If you’re using Vim, you can also press v to select a region of text and y to copy the region. pressing V has a similar effect but for entire lines and Ctrl+v selects a block of text (very useful to insert the same text on every line by pressing I and then typing. and also very powerful if used with a filtering command: with a block of text selected, press ! and type a “filter” command like ’sed’ with arguments. this way you can easily make complex modifications on a small subset of your text)

By: Wayne

Wayne — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:43:10 +0000

That’s annoying… hmm > <

By: Spence

Spence — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:34:46 +0000

grr…

map gg_vG$

Edit: Wayne at Oct 21 10:45 pm
Fixed it… ampersand lt(or gt) followed by semicolon did the trick.