#vi
This is far more interesting than I thought.
It is 50 years ago that Unix as we know it came out (i.e. not the very first one).
So the Freedos channel tried to work as one would have worked 50 years ago.
After showing the man pages and commands from the various versions of unix, the vid get interesting.
Using a vt100 or 200 emulator, he uses the ed line editor to write a fortran60 program and documentation in nroff, a mark up language.
I like using ed because it keeps you quite focussed - as you'll see you're usually only working within the scope of a paragraph, but you can still make global changes - it is really as easy as he shows.
Ed is the predecessor of vi, vim etc.
On my system I have only the problem of using the left arrow key and rolling back and forwards with the up and down arrow keys. This is fixed by calling ed with rlwrap thus:
rlwrap ed filename
What interested me was nroff - it's the markup with which man pages are written, and as you can see in the video, is used for any documentation/publishing.
This old paper is easy to read, it explains nroff (also vi etc.):
Word Processing Made Easy Using UNIX [PDF}(https://archive.org/download/395768306-word-processing-using-unix/395768306-Word-Processing-Using-UNIX.pdf)
A reference book:
Unix Text Processing PDF
GNU Linux - what to do - if there is no vi and no less - nano can do both
in theory yes, nano can replace vi and less, but in reality, it faults on large amount of data-files-streams
<span style="color: #00ffff;">hostnamectl</span>; # as seen on
Static hostname: giada
Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)
Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-17-amd64
Architecture: x86-64
# example<span style="color: #00ffff;">
wget https://thesquareplanet.com/feed.xml
</span># 328K? wohoo very "large" file<span style="color: #00ffff;">
du -hs feed.xml
</span>328K feed.xml<span style="color: #00ffff;">
cat feed.xml | nano -
</span>
#linux #gnu #gnulinux #opensource #administration #sysops #nano #vi #less #bash
Originally posted at: https://dwaves.de/2021/08/19/gnu-linux-what-to-do-if-there-is-no-vi-and-no-less-nano-can-do-both/
vi: the ultimate guide
How to use the console text editor vi
Whenever you end up with vi open in your terminal, type :q and press enter. Then, type nano <path-of-the-file-you-want-to-edit> and press enter.
If anything goes wrong and you can't quit vi, just power cycle your machine.
In the next lesson, we will learn how to fix git problems by cloning the repository in a fresh new place and copying manually the local changes.
