Standard Training: VIM - Vi IMproved, a programmer's text editor¶

HPC are often used remotely via command line operations.

Familiarity with a text-editor without graphical user interface (GUI) is important to your productivity as a computational scientist.

vim (sometimes aliased to vi) is also the most commonly available text editor on supercomputers.

High Productivity after Steep Learning Curve

Training to use a text editor might sound ridiculous, but a editor can make game-changing productivity (with an unexpected learning curve).

When used for HPC, it might be good to choose those with CLI.

vim has a steep learning curve because it has several editing modes

It is worth investing time in overcoming this learning curve as the editing modes enables many techniques for fast editing.

tutorials

Try build-in tutorial for vim by:

vimtutor

compare files

visual block mode

In normal mode, use Control-v to trigger visual block mode.
Select a visual block (more than one line), inset text with Shift+i (capital I) to insert text; press Esc to finish inserting same text in all lines of the block.
Select a visual block (more than one line), press d to delete the block (can be pasted as a block at the cursor by p in normal mode)

Lowercase i will not work.

Then type the things you want and finally to apply it to all lines, press Esc twice.

External Resources¶

Alternative editors