vip: Ex Commands

 
 3 Ex Commands
 *************
 
 In vi mode, you can execute an Ex command EX-COMMAND by typing:
      : EX-COMMAND <RET>
    Every Ex command follows the following pattern:
      ADDRESS COMMAND ! PARAMETERS COUNT FLAGS
 where all parts are optional.  For the syntax of “address”, the reader
 is referred to the reference manual of Ex.
 
    In the current version of VIP, searching by Ex commands is always
 “magic”.  That is, search patterns are always treated as “regular
 expressions”.  For example, a typical forward search would be invoked by
 ‘:/PAT/’.  If you wish to include ‘/’ as part of PAT you must preceded
 it by ‘\’.  VIP strips off these ‘\’’s before ‘/’ and the resulting PAT
 becomes the actual search pattern.  Emacs provides a different and
 richer class or regular expressions than Vi/Ex, and VIP uses Emacs’s
 regular expressions.  See GNU Emacs Manual for details of regular
 expressions.
 
    Several Ex commands can be entered in a line by separating them by a
 pipe character ‘|’.
 

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