If, like mine, your colleagues are constantly moaning about vi when installing their machines, have them read this!
Print the essential commands shown below, stick them on top of the coffee machine and have your coworkers recite them before getting a coffee. After a week, they’ll be ready to fix any Linux box with the stock tools, even when lost in the middle of a desert (I must admit I haven’t tried the desert bit, but it should work).
Essential commands
- ESC
- toggles between insert and command mode
- h,j,k,l
- cursor left,down,up,right
- i
- insert before cursor position
- A
- add at end of line
- o
- open (insert) a line after current line
- dd
- delete current line
- CTRL-F / CTRL-B
- page forward / backward
- ZZ
- quit and save
- :q!
- quit without saving
- w,b
- word forward/backward
- cw
- change word (end with ESC)
- x
- erase one character
- d5d
- delete 5 lines from current position
- dw
- erase one word
- yy
- copy current line to buffer (yank)
- p
- paste buffer after current line
- CTRL-G
- display file information at bottom of screen
- 3G
- go to line 3
- /expr
- search forward for a regular expression
- n
- repeat forward search
- N
- repeat backwards search
- :g/word1/s//word2/gc
- replace word1 by word2 in the whole file with user confirmation.
- :/word1/s//word2/gc
- replace word1 by word2 in current line with user confirmation.
bertrand's brain grep 
Cool, one which I use a lot is “gqap” which word-wrapped the current paragraph. In combination with :set ai , it even works on indented text, great for making things look nice.
Its nice to see VI help floating around. When I was lecuring I always forced the first year students to use VI on the Unix servers for their work. Students don’t necessarily understand why your certain items are on the course. Its not always obvious but it is a part of the big picture. I view basic VI knowledge as being very important even if you don’t use it as your primary editor.
I’ve been using these commands, but a bit differently :
w : save
q : quit
wq : quit and save
dd : delete line
5dd : delete 5 lines
cw : change word
5cw : change 5 words
.. and so on, nearly every command can be preceded with a number to repeat multiple times, wuite useful for example :
yy : copy line
5p : paste line 5 times
“:5” : go to line number 5
/expr : search for expression
/ : search again
It’s nice to see how many ways there are in VI to achieve the same results.
One very useful command is also :
set paste
It will activate the “paste mode”, so that if you are connecting from a terminal you can cut and paste in the terminal and avoid automatic indentation and other interpretation that would clutter your pasted code.
your: d5d
is too long
try: 5x
:), save 1 char
@aizatto: 5x deletes 5 characters from current cursor position. d5d deletes 5 lines from current cursor position