Learn a little vim

Nothing to hand in and you don't have to do this today, but do it soon!

vi (pronounced VEE-EYE) dates back to 1976, and has been my editor of choice since 1980. Its modern versions (where "modern" means anything since 1991) are usually referred to as "vim" (for "vi improved", pronounced VIM). There are tons of tutorials, including a vim-learning game, a kind of gamelike tutorial, and lots of short introductions.

When you're working in a Unix command-line environment, it doesn't take long for you to find yourself confronted by editing in vi, sometimes by accident, because it's often the default editor used by other programs. Even just knowing how to recognize that you're in vi, and how to save and quit or quit without saving, will help you out of some unexpected situations. Of course, once you get the hang of it, vi is also extremely powerful and extremely convenient.

So, learn enough vi that you can do the following:

• create a new text file named something.txt
• add a few lines of text to it
• save
• quit
• go back in
• delete a line
• delete a word
• delete a character
• add a word in the middle of a line
• search for a word
• quit
• go back in, make a change, and quit without saving

Once you can do those things, you're on your way and you won't be afraid to edit a file at the command line.