When I am editing and having a “clumsy fingers” day, I find that I have to reload the file that I am editing from disk repeatedly. I usually just do a quick “:q!” and re-run the vi command that opened the file. But there is a better way!

Use the :edit command:

:edit

Or you can shorten it to

:e

Now if you have typed in the window you are editing and want to reload from disk anyway without saving, remember to add the exclamation point(!) to the command.

:edit!

or

:e!

If you have ever used vi to edit source code, there are occasions where you get on a system that has a very difficult to read color mode. At these times you want the colors to just go away. You can use the following in command mode in vi:

This will toggle off the syntax highlighting mode.

:syntax off

This will turn it back on.

:syntax on

I was working on a system the other day and needed to see where the end of lines were and where there were tabs instead of spaces. And I found the list option to vi.

This will turn on the display of “$” to indicate the end of line and “^I” to indicate a tab.

:set list

This will turn off the option to display the end of line and tabs.

:set nolist

This turns off word wrap in the vi window

:set nowrap

to enable it again:

:set wrap