Special Edition Using® Mac® OS X v10.2

Working with Basic Unix Applications

You learned earlier that several Unix applications are included with Mac OS X. Although you aren't likely to use these instead of your Mac OS X applications for your everyday work, sometimes these applications can be quite useful. For example, you might want to use the vi text editor to create shell scripts. A couple of examples will show you how such applications work.

Editing Text with vi

The Unix application vi is a basic text editor. You can use it to create and edit text files; what it is most useful for is creating shell scripts. You are unlikely to use it to create text documents, but you can use it to create plain text documents if you would like to.

The vi program has two modes: Edit and Command. ...