as I'm going through the process of learning vim, I'm discovering newfound powers. one of them being to execute commands from vim itself.
below examples might better explain some of them:
-
want to see what files are in current directory? enter command mode(by typing
:) and follow it by a bang(!). then dolslike you'd do in a terminal and press enter. this is not limited to just ls. you can enter any command that you can enter in terminal. for example::! uname --operating-system(which will output GNU/Linux :)) -
so you want to quickly save just a certain part of your file into another file? just select everything you need by entering visual mode(
v) and do:w filename(actual command you'll see would be'<,'>:w filename). verify it using 1.(i.e.,:! cat filename. -
want to quickly paste another file into current one? do
:r filename. it'll paste its contents below your cursor. -
or maybe you want to paste results of a command? do
:r !ls *.png.
vim is my ~ sweet ~ now. make it yours too.
Help, how do I exit vi?
Hmmm.... never thought about that, honestly, but it makes sense
Sudo not even needed unless you were running vim as root
Yeah, but in case I’m on a server, I’m going to free all the other trapped users, too! (Although I’d probably just terminate the ssh session then)
Just make sure you are using a GNU system.
Luckily it shouldn't do anything but error out on Unix boxes, as
vimis not a valid process signal and their version of killall expects a signal argument (or just-)