Lab meeting: Learning the vim editor

If you arrive before lab begins, feel free to log on, work on assignments, or begin the lab work.

This week we will be using the vim editor in addition to the commands we have already learned. On most modern unix machines vim and vi are the same thing. If you have questions about vim, you can look it up in your book or follow the links from the class site. If you cannot remember what a command does, try 'man <command>'.  Also, there is a tutorial on fundamental and advanced vi at the University of Washington that you can reference.

List of Tasks

1. Download (save link/page ) the file vi_practice file to your home directory.
2. Open this file in the vim (vi) editor.
3. (1 point) Practice cursor movement commands:
• move the cursor right and left one character, and down and up one line
• move the cursor 10 characters to the right, then 5 lines down by pressing only 5 keys
• move the cursor to the beginning of a line, then go word by word across the line
• move the cursor to the beginning and the end of the line with single character commands
• move the cursor to line 20 without counting the lines, then go up one page (screen)
4. (1 point) Practice editing commands:
• delete the first line of the file (there is a delete-line command)
• delete the first 2 characters of what is now line 7
• Add words "AND DYNAMICS" right after line 15, on the same line.
• join lines 19 and 20
5. (1 point) Practice search and replace commands:
• go to the beginning of the file and find the next occurrence of the word "and". Replace it with "OR".
• Replace all occurences of string "and" with "or"
• Find string "understor". Where did this one come from?
• Now find every occurence of "And" and replace it with "But"
6. Save the file and quit vi, which returns you to the shell prompt.
7. Download vi_practice_edited Make sure you did everything correctly by typing the command 
           diff vi_practice vi_practice_edited
   This command looks for any differences in the contents of the two files. If you get no output from this command, you've done everything correctly.  You can also compare the two files next to each other by typing
           diff -y vi_practice vi_practice_edited
8. Now we're going to edit another text file - this time a PDB file that describes a real protein. Right click on this link and choose "Save link as... Or Save to disk...". Save the file in your home directory. Now open another unix shell and create a file named lab2_my_answers in your home directory. You will put your answers to questions Q1, Q2 and Q3 (below) in it, each answer on its own line. Eaxmple: Q1: Bla-bla-bla ...
9. Open the file in the vi editor, and make the following changes:
• (1 point) Change the date on the first line to today's date
• (2 points ) Delete all lines from 130 to 230.
• (1 point ) Replace every string "ATOM" with "ELEMENT"
• (1 point ) Q1: How many total lines are in your file now?
• ( 3 points ) Decrease the spacing between string "ELEMENT" and the number next to it by exactly two spaces, for EVERY LINE in the file.
• (1 point each ) Q2: What animal ( ORGANISM_COMMON ) does this protein come from? Q3: What is the scientific name for this animal?
• Save each file and quit vi.

Assessment

When you have finished editing the PDB and the answer files, call your instructor.