This chapter introduces you to some of the more advanced capabilities of the vi and ex editors. You should be reasonably familiar with the material presented in the earlier chapters of this book before you start working with the concepts presented here.

We have divided this chapter into five parts. The first part discusses a number of ways to set options that allow you to customize your editing environment. You’ll learn how to use the set command and how to create a number of different editing environments using .exrc files.

The second part discusses how you can execute Unix commands from within vi, and how you can use vi to filter text through Unix commands.