In the vim command s/blah/meh/g, what do the s and g stand for? Are they shorthand for a longer word?

Question

Brian Bi · Accepted Answer

Both "s" and "g" come from sed(1). The "s" stands for substitute and the "g" for global. The command "sed s/blah/meh/g" would replace all occurrences of "blah" with "meh" in the file, as opposed to "sed s/blah/meh/" which would just replace the first occurrence (if any) on each line.

Vim's s command has inherited this flag, although it doesn't really mean global; it just means to replace all the occurrences on the current line, as opposed to simply the first one on the line. If you want truly global scope, use :%s rather than :s. (The % works with other commands too; for example :%d will cut the entire file.)

Asish Prabhakar Kottala · Answer

Phillip Remaker [ https://www.quora.com/profile/Phillip-Remaker ]'s answer addresses your confusion spot on. Here are details of what some other vim commands stand for (and what they do). I am only considering the lower case commands here. Almost always, the upper case command does the same thing as lower case with slight changes.
1. i - insert text
2. a - append text
3. y - yank text (Copy)
4. x - cut text (Similar to regular cut shortcut, Ctrl-x)
5. d - delete text (works similar to cut)
6. p - paste text
7. u - undo
8. w - jump by start of words. Essentially go to next word and land at the beginning.
9. e - jump to end of words. Essentially go to next word and land at the end.
10. b - jump backwards by words.
11. $ - jump to end of line (Same as $ in regex)
12. ^ - jump to first non-space character of the line (Similar to ^ in regex)
13. 0 - Go to zeroth character of the line. (Essentially beginning of the line)
14. %3E%3E - Shift text right
15. %3C%3C - Shift text left
16. vsplit - Vertical Split.
17. Ctrl-w - Control the windows after they are split.
18. Ctrl-w followed by Left, Right, Up, Down arrows to toggle between the windows.
19. Ctrl-w followed by Ctrl-r to rotate the windows.
20. z - Control the folds. Use "Z-Fold" to memorize.
21. zo - open the fold
22. zc - close the fold
23. ciw - change (cut) inner word.
24. yiw - yank inner word.
These are the few I use. For more detailed list, 78 Keyboard Shortcuts for VIM [ http://www.keyxl.com/aaa8263/290/VIM-keyboard-shortcuts.htm ].

Hope this helps.

Phillip Remaker · Answer

Adding an "!" to the end of a command means "AND I MEAN IT DO NOT QUESTION ME!" This is just the same way you add an exclamation point to an English sentence for emphasis.

q is short for quit.

w is short for write (as in a file)

The commands are listed, left to right, in the order you want to execute them.

:w  - write the file.
:q - quit the editor.
:wq - write and immediately quit.

These commands will throw an error message if you are about to overwrite a file or lose edits.  That extra step is annoying for power users, so they shout the command at vi in order to bypass any questions.

:w!  - WRITE, GODDAMMIT!!!  I DON'T CARE IF YOU OVERWRITE MY WORK!!

:q! - QUIT NOW!!! DO NOT QUESTION MY AUTHORITY!!

:wq! - I'M REALLY IN A HURRY HERE!! OVERWRITE THE FILE AND GET ME BACK TO THE SHELL, STAT!! I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR TRIFLING QUESTIONS!

:qw! makes no sense, since you would quit before writing.  Therefore, it is not a valid command.

Typing a number before a command says the number of times it will repeat (6dd to delete 6 lines) or the index for the command 45G is "go to line 45")

Typing a marker in a two-character action command (d-, f-, F-, y-, etc) will mark the scope of that command.  For example { and } will jump to the beginning and end of a paragraph, but d{ and d} will delete from the current position to those places. Similarly, d) and d( will delete to the end or beginning of a sentence, respectively.

Remember that command interpretation happens left to right.  Commands will be interpreted character by character as typed, so there needs to be some parsing uniqueness from left to right.

A ":" will start any command that has an arbirary length, or that will only be executed when "enter" is pressed, for example: 
:w this_is_a_long_filename 
It is also required for any command that might spawn a feedback message at the bottom of the screen (like quitting).  It also allows ridiculously complex commands like a sophisticated set of deletions (see the ":d" command).

All of this is confusing to new users, but when you start working with big documents you will say, "boy, I wish there was an easy way to do $X," and you will find that there will be.  vi has been honed by the refiners fire of many years serving lazy programmers looking to save keystrokes.  You may come to love and appreciate its terse and quirky elegance.

PROTIP: With any well developed program, every time you think, "there should be an easier way to do this," chances are there is.  You will not have been the first person to feel that pain.

Arnold Hausmann · Answer

Phillip did a good job with “ex” commands…which are not really vim commands, but older—and still part of vim.

Vim has its own language in “normal mode”, particularly when used with text objects. Being a modal editor, you add text in “insert mode”, and do most everything else in “normal mode” or other special modes closely associated with “normal mode”.

Generally speaking, the language is “modifier…verb”, e.g. “5d” will delete 5 lines starting with the line with the cursor. So, “d” to delete, “y” to copy (aka, “yank”), and “p” to put/paste. Usually, the commands are in lower case, and upper case versions either reverse course or have another special meaning. (“P” will “put before”, while “p” will “put after”, “N” is “previous find”, while “n” is “next find”, “X” is “delete prior character” or “backspace”, while “x” is “delete next character”, but “D” is “delete till end of line”.

Text objects are a game-changer. A “daw” will “delete a word” (delete from cursor until a space, hyphen, or other punctuation. The “diw” will “delete inner word”, so if the cursor is in the middle of the word it will still delete the word…beginning to end. But, you can change the “w” to “s” to do the same to a sentence…or a “p” to affect a paragraph, etc.

Many “plugins” use the text objects to extend the functionality, like Tim Pope’s “Surround.” So, learning the text objects, and the “language” of Vim is very worthwhile, and can turn you into a champ of a developer.

Phillip, thank you for the reply requesting to change my post to an answer—still can’t figure out how to “change” a reply to an answer, but copy and paste still works. :-)

Arnold Hausmann · Answer

“G” in normal mode goes to the end of the buffer. With a number prefix, it will go to the specified line number. IOW, “1G” will go to the first line, while “$G” is a long way of stating “G”, as “$” is the end of file. A “shortcut” for “1G” is “gg”.

“G” cannot be used for going to a mark; see “:h G” for proof, as the help doesn’t mention marks, but line numbers.

To go to a named mark—or an unnamed mark—use the backtick or single-quote keys in normal mode, followed by the indicated mark. The backtick will go to the exact location of the mark, while single-quote will go to the beginning of the line containing the mark. The backtick and single-quote can also be used by themselves by hitting the keys twice, to toggle back and forth to previous location. Again, they work the same way, backtick going to the exact previous location, and single-quote going to the beginning of the line containing the last position.

HTH

Kurt Howard · Answer

Words that are spelled alike are homographs. Words that are pronounced alike are homophones. Homographs can be homophones.

RUN has about 150 or more different meanings (depending on the dictionary).

Here are some examples of 5-letter words that have multiple meanings.

BRAND
Symbols and styling associated with a company.
Affixing symbols to a product or object.

DRINK
A beverage.
To consume a beverage.

PAINT
A colored substance that is applied to an object and dries so that the object retains the coloring.
To apply a colored substance to an object.
A horse with a 2-color patch-like coat.

PATCH
A small piece of a material meant to cover a hole.
To repair a hole.

PHONE
A communication device.
To use a communication device.

POINT
A sharp corner.
To indicate direction using a finger.

QUAIL
A bird.
To cower.

SPELL
To articulate the letters of a word.
A short amount of time.

WATER
H2O,
To hydrate plants.

Here are a few more: Adder, agape, brace, chest, close, float, flush, grave, gorge, leave, match, model, moped, mouse, novel, ought, pitch, plain, pound, rebel, recap, right, round, ruler, scale, sewer, sheer, short, spoke, stone, story, train, upset, virus, watch.

Alan K Stebbens · Answer

The original reason is that “vi” is the “VIsual editor”, as opposed to the normal editor, or just “ed”.

Most of the original Unix commands were two letters: “ls”, “df”, “cd”, etc.

“ed” is the “editor”, a line editor, where commands are accepted and performed on the file text, one or more lines at a time, whether or not they were displayed.

“vi” was originally a curses-based screen editor, or “visual” editor, with an interactive WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach to editing text.

“vim” was developed out of the original “vi” code base, greatly enhanced and even given an internal programming language, called “vimscript”.

“neovim” is a complete re-write of “vim”, mostly backward-compatible, with better multi-threading and multi-processing support.

Shashwat Malasi (शाश्वत मलासी) · Answer

Thank you for asking as it forced me to think a lot....

1. ‘is' on adding h before ‘is' we get ‘his'.
2. ‘Gater' generally means to spoil. On adding h after t, we get ‘gather' which means to accumulate.
3. ‘as'. On adding h in the starting, we get ‘has'
4. On adding h in the end, we get ‘ash'.
5. ‘am'. On adding h in the starting, we get ‘ham' which means ‘pork'.
6. “ ‘tis" is an informal way of writing “it is". On adding h after t we get ‘this'
7. ‘soal' means (British english) a dirty pond. On adding h after s, we get ‘shoal' which has many different meanings like group, shallow, etc.
Upto now, I could think these 7 words. After sometime, I'll edit the answer as soon as I come across some more words.

Hope it helps.

Happy reading !!

John Connor · Answer

Sure, it happens all the time in English. For example, “swallow” is a kind of bird; “swallow” is a also a verb. “Fly” is an insect; “fly” is also a verb.

So

“A swallow flies.” means that a specific kind of bird travels through the air.

“I swallow flies.” means that I have insects in my mouth, and I do the action with my throat muscles that transfers the flies into my stomach.

How do you tell the difference? Context. If you are talking about birds, about things that travel through the air, then the first sentence applies. There is also a slight difference between the sound of “a” (the indefinite article) and “I” (first person singular pronoun) - and those small words provide context for the rest of the sentence. The “A” means that what comes next must be a noun or possibly a string of adjectives followed by a now, so “swallow” after “A” is understood to be a noun, so it is understood as a bird. Then after a noun you expect a verb, so “flies” after “swallow” in the first sentences is understood as a verb, third person singular present simple of “fly”. The whole sentence makes sense, because a swallow is a bird, and birds fly.

The second sentence starts with a subject pronoun, “I”. Because there is a subject pronoun, then what comes next has to be a verb - so we understand “swallow” in the second sentence as the verb “to swallow”. “Swallow” as a verb can be transitive - in other words you can put a noun (or noun phrase) after swallow to describe what is swallowed. So “flies” here is understood as a plural noun, the plural of the noun “fly”, a small annoying insect. So the whole sentence also makes sense, describing a slightly unpleasant action (at least, I wouldn’t want to eat flies…)

English is very sensitive to context; fortunately we aren’t usually limited just to the context within one sentence, but we can use the preceding and following text or discussion to understand what meaning is intended.

Dan Rudman · Answer

like "Jim" (and not vee-eye-em).

Reference: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/intro.html

John · Answer

If by writing, you mean hand written material, then put the last word by itself on the next line. If you don't like that appearance, add a short sentence as a seque to the next paragraph or simply to make the end more visually appealing. Same approach for documents prepared on a typewriter.

If you refer to output from a word processor or a layout program, you now enter the world of "type-setting." Here, there will be 2 sources to guide you:

* A style manual as instructed by the publisher. It will tell you what to do with danglers, widows, orphans and other visual aspects of the document.
 * Your own idea of what "looks good."

Assuming the latter, your best bet for the dangler is to change the spacing between letters in the entire paragraph; either shrink them together to pull the word up, or expand to force a second or third word onto the same line.

Hope that helps.

Anonymous · Answer

:g runs a command on each line that matches a given pattern, in the form :g/pattern/cmd.

^ is a regex that matches the beginning of a line. So all lines, by definition, will match this pattern.

m0 moves a line to the 0th position (ie. the top of the buffer).

Put them all together:

:g iterates through each line, top down. Placing each successive line at the top of the file has the effect of reversing the order of lines.

Anonymous · Answer

viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html

Arnold Hausmann · Answer

If by advanced you mean infrequently used, likely many of the ex commands would fit, as would extensive use of registers. When coding, say I need to copy 10 lines of code which starts 15 lines above the cursor. “:-15,-5 t.” does the trick, pasting the lines below the current line. Obviously, the “-15,-5” is a range of lines using relative position (why I like relative line numbers), the “t” is the Copy command, and the “.” refers to the current line.

Other commands are yanking text into named registers; you can do this in normal mode or visual/command mode. Either way, you name registers with a

Other commands are yanking text into named registers; you can do this in normal mode or visual/command mode. Either way, you name registers with a double-quote, like ‘:100,115 “ay’ would copy lines 100 thru 115 to register “a”. Pasting is done similarly, by double-quoting the “a” register followed by “p” to paste.

This is powerful stuff. If you use persistent undo, your undo state—including register contents—is written to a file, thus you can load up 10 registers or more with pre-written content you need to paste in several places, and continue working with the same saved registers the next day and the next, until you kill the register.

Sarah Setta · Answer

Depends on which language you are shootin to hear from. My americanism would say vehm. But to be a little more scandignavian, i might look at it as veem. But it i want to be a bit awkward i could run into vym, as if the y was a long i sound.

Baptiste Fontaine · Answer

The [code vim]:v[/code] command is the same as [code vim]:g![/code], which is the opposite of [code vim]:g[/code].

[code vim]:g/pattern/command[/code] executes [code vim]command[/code] on each line of the buffer that matches [code vim]pattern[/code]. Similarly [code vim]:v/pattern/command[/code] executes [code vim]command[/code] on each line of the buffer that does not match [code vim]pattern[/code]. The percentage sign at the beginning tells Vim to apply this command on the whole file, but is useless here because this is the default behavior of [code vim]:v[/code] and [code vim]:g[/code].

Vim starts by marking each line that matches the pattern, then start again at the beginning of the file and executes the command on each line which matches (or not) the pattern. In your case, it’s a replacement: [code vim]s/foo/bar/g[/code] replaces every occurrence of [code]foo[/code] with [code]bar[/code] in the current context. Without the trailing [code]g[/code], it would only replace the first occurrence.

Arnold Hausmann · Answer

All have good answers. I didn’t see using marks, which presuppose prior maneuvering in a file. In conjunction with persistent undo, marks are a powerful tool. For example, I frequently need to reference a particular PL/SQL package source code in my local repository. I have places marks in a number of spots containing recognizable comments which tell me what each mark is. The marks persist from session to session. Then I have a mapping to execute the “marks” command, listing each possible mark (“a” through “z”—no shortcuts, the mapping actually has to list all 26 letters). Since there are “only” around 8–10 marks that I really need to see constantly, I have plenty of “room” for the occasional ad hoc mark when actively researching an issue.

Chris Fisher · Answer

G in command mode is used to go to a mark.

Use “m(letter)” to set a mark at the current location to a letter: a-z/A-Z.

Michael Peacock · Answer

If you must split a word, the rule is to split it between syl-
lables.

If the word is only one syllable it should not be split.

Make sure there are at least two letters plus the hy-
phen on the first line and three letters on the second.

Dividing Words at End of Line [ http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000129.htm ]

Pradeep CE · Answer

vi

The abbreviation Visual Interactive doesn't seem to be right, although that is what turns up second in the Google results.

The first result is the Wikipedia page on vi [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi ] that states

%3E The name vi is derived from the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the command [code]visual[/code] in ex

[code]ex[/code] was a line editor in BSD Unix.

Vim

Vim stands for vi IMproved, and as the name suggests, is essentially an extended version of vi with added features. Take a look at Vim (text editor) [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor) ] for details about its history.

It is also worth nothing that Vim originally was an acronym for vi IMitation, but was later changed to vi IMproved in its next version.

GCC, gcc

GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection, where GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix. It includes compilers for C, C++, Objective-C and a host of other languages. Homepage - GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection [ https://gcc.gnu.org/ ].

It originally stood for GNU C Compiler, back when it only supported the C programming language.

The command gcc also means GNU Compiler Collection, and it essentially serves as a front-end for several compilers and the linker. Source - Page on stackoverflow.com [ http://stackoverflow.com/a/172592/3186769 ]

Off topic, you should also know that the actual compiler for C is cc1, and that for C++ is cc1plus. gcc is actually a driver that calls the Preprocessor [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preprocessor ], Compiler [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler ], Assemble [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language#Assembler ]r, Linker [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linker_(computing) ] as needed. Source - Page on stackoverflow.com [ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/172587/what-is-the-difference-between-g-and-gcc#comment96004_172592 ]

Hope that helped [code]:)[/code] Thanks for the A2A!