different versions of vi?

wogga · 05-31-2004, 11:59 AM

I was going through a book
"The complete idiot's guide to Linux

"
good for newbies

i was going through the basics of vi
it says shift+h places teh cursor at the begining of the file
shoft+l takes you to te last line of the current file.

however when i tried it out
i found that shift+h goes one character left and shift+l goes one character right.

are there different versions of vi?

trickykid · 05-31-2004, 12:17 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by wogga
I was going through a book
"The complete idiot's guide to Linux "
good for newbies

i was going through the basics of vi
it says shift+h places teh cursor at the begining of the file
shoft+l takes you to te last line of the current file.

however when i tried it out
i found that shift+h goes one character left and shift+l goes one character right.

are there different versions of vi?

There are and at times some distros don't even use or install vi any longer, they might link to another program instead, like joe or jed, etc. One of the many other editors and many vi clones as well out there. What distro are you using?

wogga · 05-31-2004, 12:21 PM

i am using redhat 9.0
why dont they standardize vi for heavens sake

wogga · 05-31-2004, 12:24 PM

i just came across pico, pico does not seem to come with redhat 9.0, (at least bash is coming back with an error),

is pico widely used, maybe i should go for mandrake 10.0, does mandrkae 10 have good editors.

do you know where i could find the md5 for mandrake 10?

Lleb_KCir · 05-31-2004, 12:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by wogga
i am using redhat 9.0
why dont they standardize vi for heavens sake

if you are running RH, then when you vi filename, you are running vim, not vi. that is why some of the commands are not working exactly as they should for vi.

as root you can unalias vi, then when you vi filename you will be in VI, not VIM.

hope that helps a bit.

from what i have seen, all distros come with vi, but more and more are aliasing to vim.

wogga · 05-31-2004, 02:56 PM

newbie question
what is "aliasing to vim."

Tinkster · 05-31-2004, 03:51 PM

To have something like
alias vi='vim'
in /etc/profile

man bash
/ALIAS
for details

Cheers,
Tink

trickykid · 05-31-2004, 04:05 PM

alias does what the word is actually defined as: also known as; otherwise..

Say your name is Andrew but you go by Drew, that can be considered an alias.

So in the world of Linux and Unix, when you alias a command, it just simply means its referring to another command, etc. Its an easy way to make one command function as another.

Say when I type ls -al to list all files in a directory but I'm lazy and wanted to type ls and get the same output, I would do a:

alias ls='ls -al'

mikshaw · 05-31-2004, 04:35 PM

If you do "type -a vi" it should tell you if your vi is an alias to another application.

It could, however, be a symlink to another application, in which case type won't help. If "type -a" comes up with something like "/usr/bin/vi" you can then do "ls -l /usr/bin/vi" to see if it's a link.