How to open a file using vi

The worst nightmare of a developer who doesn't know how to work with the command line and/or work with files on the command line (opening, editing, saving, exiting the f*cking... ehm awesome editor): Needing to log in to a server via SSH aka having only the command line available. What will you do if you have to edit a file when there is no text editor with a UI available?

I know, I know, you can ask another developer but why not solve the issue on your own? So let's start with preventing you from looking like this Junior Developer when you are in such a situation by learning how to open a file using vi first.

How to open vi

To open vi, just type the command vi in your terminal. In case that vim is available on your system, the vi command will open vim. The vi command will open vi/vim displaying some hints:

~
~
~                    VIM - Vi IMproved
~                     version 9.0.270
~                 by Bram Moolenaar et al.
~       Vim is open source and freely distributable
~                 Sponsor Vim development!
~      type  :help sponsor<Enter>    for information
~      type  :q<Enter>               to exit
~      type  :help<Enter>  or  <F1>  for on-line help
~      type  :help version9<Enter>   for version info
~
~

As you can see, it displays how to get help (typing :help). That's very nice of vi 😁

Note that there are several tildes ("~") which mean "no content" (i.e. no text and no blank lines).

Opening vi like this can be used to first write down whatever you want to write down and save it as a new file when you are done and want to exit vi.

How to open an existing file

To open an existing file, you need to type the vi command followed by the file name: vi [filename], e.g. vi my-file or vi path/to/directory/my-file to open the file "my-file" which is located in another directory. As you can see the brackets should not be typed. Vi will then look something like this:

this is some content
~
~
~
~
"my-file" [noeol] 1L, 20B

The line at the bottom is called prompt line or status line.

We can extract the following information from the status line:

the name of the current file is "my-file"
the file does not contain an end-of-line on the last line, i.e. no newline (\n) at the end ("[noeol]")
the number of lines of the file is 1 ("1L")
the size of the file is 20 Bytes ("20B")

How to open a new file

Let's say we wanted to open a non-existing file in vi, we could do so by specifying the file name after the vi command like beforehand: vi my-new-file. It is even possible to specify that the new file should be located in another directory, e.g. vi path/to/directory/my-new-file. Vi will then look something like this:

~
~
~
"my-new-file" [New]

We can extract the following information from the status line:

the name of the current file is "my-new-file"
"my-new-file" is a new file ("[New]")

Recap

In this article we learned

how to open vi by using the vi command
how to open an existing and a new file by using the vi command, e.g. vi my-file or vi path/to/directory/my-file
that tildes mean that there is no content
that the line at the bottom is called "prompt line" or "status line"
what the content in the status line means

Watch it on YouTube

You can watch me explaining how to open a file using vi and vim in this video: