vi Books
I own published copies of both of these books, and I find each of them excellent in its own way. The Lamb book is what I started with...well, actually, I started with the brief vi and ex command summaries in the 1990 printing of Unix in a Nutshell by O'Reilly & Associates and puzzled my way along until I got Lamb's book. I purchased the H-P book later, after I already knew enough to get through a work day using vi without looking at a manual, but that book has still been useful for its clear explanations.
- Hewlett-Packard Company (1990, The Ultimate Guide to the vi and ex Text Editors (Redwood City, CA: Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co.).
- 11 Chapters, plus an appendix on regular expressions. This book takes a task-oriented approach to teaching the use of the vi and ex editors and includes many examples.
- Lamb, Linda and Arnold Robbins (1998), Learning the vi Editor 6th ed. (Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates), 348 pp.
- Starts with a beginner's tutorial and works up to using ex, global replacement, and advanced editing techniques. The 6th edition now includes information on several vi-clones: nvi, elvis, vim, and vile. The 8th edition has been out for a while by Arnold Robbins, Elbert Hanna, and Linda Lamb.
- Drew Neil (2015, Practical Vim - Edit Text at the Speed of Thought (Dallas, TX: Pragmatic Bookshelf), 354 pp.
- Learn core functionality of vim. More than 120 tips for editing and writing tasks.
- Kim Schulz (2007, Hacking Vim (Birmingham UK: Packt Publishing), 233 pp.
- A cookbook for getting the most out of the latest vim editor. Full of tips, formatting help, setups, and scripting explanations.
- Steve Oualline (2001, Vi IMproved - Vim (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders), 624 pp.
- An amazing book, full of tips, how-tos, and details for learning and using Vim. Basic and advanced editing. Searching, text blocks, multiple files. Foreword by Bram Moolenaar.
Also of interest for vi users is:
- Friedl, Jeffrey E.F., Mastering Regular Expressions (Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates), 340+ pp.
- This must be the most comprehensive tutorial and reference about regular expressions published to-date. It includes in-depth explanations of how regular expressions do their work and many descriptions of the various unix tools that incorporate regular expressions (such as vi). This book really gets to the method behind the madness of regular expressions and is an excellent reference.
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Last modified: Sat Aug 30 20:10:58 EDT 2025