Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

38Chapter 2An Embarrassment of Riches: EditorsmyArraylist.doSomething(magical); // coolFrom the beginning of the line, you’d need to type w seven times (or knowto type 7w—but how could you guess seven?) To help out, vi uses the uppercaseW to skip words defined not by punctuation but solely by white space.Think of it as “bigger” words. And of course B will go “back” by these biggerwords. So on our example line, a single W will get you to the start of thecomment.Be sure that you’re not just reading these descriptions. Run vi on any filethat you can find and practice navigating by lines or words or screens. Onceyou get the hang of it, it can be so much faster than reaching for the mouse andtrying to maneuver the cursor into just the right spot between letters.Sometimes you can see where you want to go based on the characters oftext in the document. See that “x”? That’s a relatively rare character on any lineof text. If you see a character, your cursor can “find” it if you type f and thenthe character you are looking for. So fx would search forward on the line foran “x”. And Fx would search backward from the cursor. To repeat the search,just type a semicolon (“;”).Searching for a string is another good way to move your way through afile. To search forward, type a slash (/), then the characters for which you wantto search, and end the string with a second slash and then Enter: 2/myArrayList/To search backwards (towards the first line of the file) use the questionmark rather than the slash to bracket your search string. In either case, to jumpto the next occurrence, type n, or 27n to jump to the 27th occurrence. Whetheryou are searching forward (/) or backward (?), using uppercase N will reversethe direction as it searches for the next occurrence. So, you can search forwardwith /myVar/ and then press n for each next occurrence forward. If you go toofar, just type N to back up. Similarly, if you were going backwards looking foran occurrence of a constructor, say something like: ?new HotClass?; theneach n will search toward the top of the file, and each N will search toward theend of file.2. The second slash is optional in most vi implementations, but used for consistency with thesame command in ex mode which has optional suffix characters.