Groundwork

The VI command set is based on the idea of combining motion commands with other commands. The motion command is used as a text region specifier for other commands. We classify motion commands into point commands and line commands.

The point commands are:

h, l, 0, $, w, W, b, B, e, E, (, ), /, ?, `, f, F, t, T, %, ;, ,, ^

The line commands are:

j, k, +, -, H, M, L, {, }, G, ', [[, ]], []

Text Deletion Commands (see section Deleting Text.), Change commands (see section Changing Text.), even Shell Commands (see section Shell Commands) use these commands to describe a region of text to operate on.

VIP adds the two region descriptors, r and R. These describe the Emacs regions (@xref{Basics}), but are not movement commands.

The command description uses angle brackets `<>' to indicate metasyntactic variables, since the normal conventions of using simple text can be confusing with VIP where the commands themselves are characters. Watch out where < shift commands and <count> are mentioned together!!!.

`<move>' refers to the above movement commands, and `<a-z>' refers to registers or textmarkers from `a' to `z'. Note that the `<move>' is described by full move commands, that is to say they will take counts, and otherwise behave like normal move commands. `<address>' refers to Ex line addresses, which include

. <No address>

Current line

.+n .-n

Add or subtract for current line

number

Actual line number, use .= to get the line number

'<a-z>

Textmarker

$

Last line

x,y

Where x and y are one of the above

%

For the whole file, same as (1,$).

/pat/ ?pat?

Next or previous line with pattern pat

Note that `%' is used in Ex commands to mean current file. If you want a `%' in your command, it must be escaped as `\%'. Similarly, `#' expands to the previous file. The previous file is the first file in :args listing. This defaults to previous window in the VI sense if you have one window only.

Others like `<args> -- arguments', `<cmd> -- command' etc. should be fairly obvious.

Common characters referred to include:

<sp>

Space

<ht>

Tab

<lf>

Linefeed

<esc>

Escape

<cr>

Return, Enter

We also use `word' for alphanumeric/non-alphanumeric words, and `WORD' for whitespace delimited words. `char' refers to any ascii character, `CHAR' to non-whitespace character. Brackets `[]' indicate optional parameters; `<count>' also optional, usually defaulting to 1. Brackets are elided for `<count>' to eschew obfuscation.

The usual Emacs convention is used to indicate Control Characters, i.e C-h for Control-h. Do not confuse this to mean the separate characters C - h!!!. The ^ is itself, never used to indicate a Control character.