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| Chapter 30 vi Tips and Tricks |

## 30.2 What We Cover

The articles in this chapter show you how to get the most for your money from vi and ex. If you've been using vi for a while, you may already know a lot of these things - but take a quick look at this list of topics to see if there's anything new to you:

- Travel between files, save text into buffers, and move it around without leaving vi: articles 30.4, 30.5, and 30.7.

- Recover deletions from up to nine numbered buffers: article 30.8.

- Do global search and replacement with pattern matching: articles 30.9, 30.14, 30.15, 30.17, and 30.27.

- Save a lot of typing with word abbreviations: articles 30.31, 30.32, and 30.33.

- "Prettify" lines of text that don't fit on the screen the way you want them to: article 30.37.

- Run other UNIX commands without leaving vi (called a filter-through): articles 30.22, 30.23, and 30.26.

- Keep track of functions and included files with ctags and tags: articles 30.28 and 30.29.

- Change your vi and ex options in your .exrc file for all files or just for files in a local directory: articles 30.6 and 30.18.

When you type a `:` (colon) command in vi, you're beginning an ex command. There's more information about ex in a later chapter: articles 33.3, 33.4, and 33.5.

- EK

30.1 The vi and ex Editors: Why So Much Material? |  | 30.3 Mice vs. vi