vi Cheatsheet

This is a cheatsheet for the defacto standard for editing files in Linux / Unix at the terminal or command line. Admittedly, it can be intimidating and frankly confusing to get started if you never have used it; however, it comes with nearly every installation of an operating system based on Unix. As a result, it can pay to learn at least the basics of how to use vi. It can really come in handy in a pinch and, with time, you may find it very useful and much faster to use then a more full featured text editor like UltraEdit / NotePad++ / etc.

vi cheatsheet and crib sheet.
vi cheatsheet and crib sheet.

Additional commands you may find helpful follow:

Navigate to an index/character/column number on a line number

Let’s say you are editing fixed-length data and you know where a particular field falls on a line. So, let’s navigate to line 2 and then character 351

2 Shift+G
351|

Now, if you want to confirm the line number and the column number, you can do the following (more info).

Ctrl+G
"fixed_length.txt" line 2 of 5 --40%-- col 351 

VI JOE Shirt

And if you consider yourself a vi expert, then maybe you’d be interested in this t-shirt

vi Joe
vi Joe

One Comment:

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