Sysadmin help: exceptionally good quick guide to VI / VIM

If you do much work administering linux servers – or, especially, if you DON’T do much, but occasionally need to – then it’s a massive time saver to be fluent in one of the text-based file editors that are found on all versions of Unix. As a developer working with game servers, I’ve found the effort invested in learning VI has paid off enormously over the years – I don’t use it as my editor of choice (I use a full fat GUI, either Visual Studio if doing C/C++ work, or Eclipse for Java/most other things), but when I’m stuck on an SSH connection needing to do some quick editing of local config files, or to fix a script on a remote server etc, it’s very very useful to be confident and effective with a text editor.

Unfortunately, as IDE’s moved on, the minimal set of features I found I can’t better to edit without got bigger and bigger. Fortunately, VI has morphed over the years (via VIM, which is the version of VI most widely used both on linux and windows it seems – it has a backwards-compatible mode that makes it work identical to VI) and adopted most of those. But … the documentation is so immensely huge that it’s a nightmare to find what you need unless you already know what you’re looking for.

So, I was delighted to find these powerpoint slides (found in this post) that give very detailed yet very easy to follow advice on using VIM, and tell you the keywords you’d need to search in the built-in help for vast amounts of extra info on each item, as well as pointers to the small subset of commands that it’s worth you learning for yourself and memorizing.

I hadn’t realised until now that VIM now has popup-autocomplete “just like in Visual Studio”, with a dialog box, method signatures, everything. Awesome! Not that I see it as any kind of replacement, of course – it’s just nice that a feature I use every few seconds in my normal programming environment (so that I’ve become accustomed to its presence) is mirrored into an editor that I occasionally have to use for short or not-so-short periods of time.