vi editor Cheat Sheet

In our day-to-day operational work , couple off times we’ve to us vi editor commands , sometimes to create or sometimes to read the file and in that case vi editor commands are very helpful to increase our productivity , especially from database perspective many times we’ve to look into different logs to figure out the root cause of the issue like digging into alert log of the database , CRS log , CSS log , OHASD log etc. although in Exadata looking only into database logs is not enough multiple times we’ve to look into other logs too like cell logs, infiband/roce switch logs , cluster patching logs etc. and without the shortcut keys anyone of us may really struggle to look for a particular issue in those files as they’re getting update in each & every second with lots of messages and during that time the shortcuts are very helpful , Some of them are as follow .

Note à I’m dividing the command in a multiple tables for a better visibility and understanding.

KEY	PURPOSE
i	To start the file in Insert Mode
esc  +  I ( In Capital Letter)	To insert the data at the beginning of the line
esc  +   a	Appends to the right of the current character
esc + A	Appends at the end of the current line
esc  +  o	Insert new line after the current line
esc  +  O ( In Capital Letter)	Insert the new line before the current line
esc  +  GG ( 2 Times)	Go to the top of the file
esc  +  Shift + G	Go into the bottom of the file

KEY	PURPOSE
l	Move one character right
Ctrl + D	Move down one-half page from current line
Ctrl + U	Move up one-half page from current line
Ctrl + F	Move forward one page
Ctrl + B	Move back one page
G	Jump
Number + j	Move the cursor down to the current line
h	Move one character left
j	Move one line down
k	Move one line up
Number + G	This command is very helpful when we get an error in a shell script with a line number and we want to go directly into the reported line number

KEY	PURPOSE
yy	Copy current line
number + yy	Copy mentioned number of line from current line
p	Paste the copied line
u	Undo the last command
r	Redo the last command
. ( dot)	Repeat the last command
esc + ? + text	Search the text from bottom
esc + / + text	Search the text from top
esc + / + text + n	Repeat the last search
esc + ? + text + N	Repeat the last search in reverse order
esc + %s/text_to_replace/new_text/gc	Change the text globally in a file

KEY	PURPOSE
esc + ZZ	Save the current file & quit vi
esc + :w	Save current file
esc + :q!	Really quit vi
esc + :n	Jump to the line number
:f	Report the name of the currentfile and line no.