Movement by Text Blocks (Learning the vi Editor, Sixth Edition)

3.2. Movement by Text Blocks

Another way that you can think of moving through a vi file is by text blocks—words, sentences, paragraphs, or sections.

You have already learned to move forward and backward by word (w, W, b or B). In addition, you can use these commands:

e

To find the end of a sentence, vi looks for one of the punctuation marks ? . !. vi locates the end of a sentence when the punctuation is followed by at least two spaces or when it appears as the last non-blank character on a line. If you have left only a single space following a period, or if the sentence ends with a quotation mark, vi won't recognize the sentence.

A paragraph is defined as text up to the next blank line, or up to one of the default paragraph macros (.IP, .PP, .LP, or .QP) from the troff MS macro package. Similarly, a section is defined as text up to the next default section macro (.NH, .SH, .H 1, .HU). The macros that are recognized as paragraph or section separators can be customized with the :set command, as described in Chapter 7.

Remember that you can combine numbers with movement. For example, 3) moves ahead three sentences. Also remember that you can edit using movement commands: d) deletes to the end of the current sentence, 2y} copies (yanks) two paragraphs ahead.