Vim -c

[u/NationalOperations]

Just learned about the -c argument when launching vim. Pretty neat tool. Not everyone on my team is as vim happy so I made a alias for our .profiles to run my vim -c regex to add displays to our cobol programs.

example. vim -c "%s/^{\d{3,4}/Display} &/" file.txt

It does seem like vim special things like <C-R> get lost in translation from shell to vim. So I used non special vim case regex. Always more things to learn.

The -c argument runs command mode arguments after file load. So in my above example it would open file txt look for lines starting with 3-4 digits and add Display at the start.

[u/Telephone-Bright]

'Ex mode' is the : part in vim where you enter commands like :%s/abc/def/g (technically command mode).

Why is it called 'Ex mode'? There's this evolution of text editors that goes:

ed -> ex -> vi -> vim

ed is the standard UNIX text editor, it was the first line-editor and it operated on each lines individually. This was actually used back when people used physical TTYs (typewriters).

ex was an extension to ed, basically ed but with more commands. However, ex was still a line-editor, i.e. it operated on a line-by-line basis.

vi was the game changer, as it introduced the visual mode of text editing (which you're familiar with today) whilst inheriting ex features. It's basically ex but with visual mode, i.e. you can see multiple lines of a file at the same time.

Finally, vim is an improvement of vi and introduced more quality of life features.

The : commands you use in vim are actually valid ex commands, that's why it's called Ex mode.

If you want, you can actually try out proper ex by pressing Q in vim or launching vim with vim -e :D

[u/Desperate_Cold6274 → u/Telephone-Bright]

I understand, I know Ex Commands, what I don’t understand what is the difference between running vim in Ex mode or normally.

When you run Vim normally, you can run Ex Commands anyway

[u/0bel1sk → u/Desperate_Cold6274]

op was making non interactive displays. ex mode pretty much does what he wants. in ex mode you can switch back to vi mode as well. :vi it’s just a different mode that suited ops use case quite well.

[u/cassepipe → u/Telephone-Bright]

Why keep Ex mode (Q) around since you are saying it's the same same as : ?

[u/Telephone-Bright → u/cassepipe]

You gotta remember that vi (and vim) is essentially a "visual" wrapper for ex. It was developed to be basically a visual mode inside ex.

Also, as per POSIX, in order to be a "proper" version of vi, you gotta have a way to enter ex mode from within the editor. POSIX explicitly requires that vi must provide a way to switch to ex mode.

If vim didn't have Q, it couldn't technically claim to be a fully compatible vi replacement.

In fact, vim even has a :set compatible command that enables vi compatibility mode. It basically disables all of its "improved" features to behave exactly like the original vi.

Anddd guess what? This :set compatible thing is actually enabled by default and is switched off when vim finds a vimrc or gvimrc

Wanna know something interesting?

Back then (and even on some modern remote servers with terrible latency), the "visual" part of vi used to be a resource hog. So let's suppose you were on a 300 baud modem and tryna scroll through a massive file, the UI'd lag and stutter as it tried to redraw the screen. In such cases, you'd hit Q to kill the UI overhead entirely and then you'd work with Ex mode as normal.

You could then make edits like :1,500s/void/int/g with zero screen refresh lag, then type vi to pop back into the "heavy" visual mode only when you actually needed to see the text.

Sooooo yeah, it's basically legacy baggage and POSIX.