Elias Tzoc blog!

Well, maybe the title should be “before Pico, now Vi” because …after a few years of using Pico as my default editor, now I’m slowly convincing myself to use Vi.  Here is why:  even though Pico is a lot easier to use and learn, these days I’m editing some huge XML and XSLT files.  I often need to replace a word in an entire file and that’s something I cannot do in Pico; whereas in Vi this is what I need:

%s/old_word/new_word/g

Another Vi function I’m using lately is the invocation of a shell while editing a file, sometimes after a quick change I need to restart a service or while editing a file I need to get the exact variable name from a different file.  In Pico I could have 2 terminal windows open, but in Vi I can do this by typing :! and a command.

:!ls –la
:!restart

Ok, now I know, …a big part of this change has to do with my recent move to the Mac environment, in the past I used to just download a file to my desktop and edit it in Notepad++, I cannot do that on the Mac Instead, I found and installed Vim –an extension of Vi- and so far it’s working fine.

…hope to post some more Vi tricks as I learn my way through!