Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

How do I get "vi" shell edit mode in Mac OS X Terminal?

I just finished Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, and think it is an excellent little resource. I'm recently out of school, a school where we weren't taught anything about Unix, just enough to get by. I started work with the data converter team at Agilent labs, and have been able to glean quite a bit off of them (considering many of them were either directly or indirectly responsible for writing many of them commands in common use today). Thus, I'm often embarrassed to ask them questions about exactly some of the stuff you cover in the book.

Okay, now for the question: at work, they have the terminal set up such that the command line works like vi. That is, if I want to search my command history, I simply change mode via escape, type /pattern_to_be_searched, it finds the command, and then I can use other vi commands to change the command a little bit, and then execute it via the shell. How do I set this up in OS X?

Dave's Answer:

Thanks for your note! I like getting these sort of Unix and Linux questions, actually, since Iv'e been working in that environment for twenty-six years now! Sheesh.

The first step is to ensure that you're running the Bash shell, which you can do by typing this in:

ps -p $$

When I run that, for example, I see this:

$ ps -p $$

   PID   TT   STAT       TIME   COMMAND

  958   p1   S       0:00.03   -bash

I'm running Bash. Good. (the '-' means it's a login shell, by the way).

What you want is "vi mode" in the Readline function. Readline is the module in Bash that processes input typing and command entry. Check the man page for Bash (which is incredibly long) and you'll find that you're talking about the readline keymapping, which is described thusly:

       keymap (emacs)
          Set  the current readline keymap.  The set of valid keymap names
          is emacs, emacs-standard, emacs-meta,  emacs-ctlx,  vi,  vi-com-
          mand,  and  vi-insert.  vi is equivalent to vi-command; emacs is
          equivalent to emacs-standard.  The default value is  emacs;  the
          value of editing-mode also affects the default keymap.

That's what you want. To set it once you've logged in, simply type:

set keymap vi

To set it permanently for all future shells, add that line to your .bashrc in your home directory. That's all there is to it!

Update: In some situations that doesn't seem to work. My theory is that it's to do with it not overriding shell environment variables (esp. SHELLOPTS). If that doesn't work for you, try this command instead: set -o vi and I bet you'll have some joy.

One more helpful tip: if you want to dig around in a Unix man page, here's a very helpful command to remember:

man bash | col -b > ~/bash.man ; vi ~/bash.man ; rm ~/bash.man

This gives you an version of the specified man page that you can explore and read at your leisure that's conveniently deleted once you're done reading it. I find it far more pleasant than just scrolling through with the "man" command.

And say "Hi" to those Unix old-timers. We probably know each other. :-)

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Stumble Upon

Categorized: Mac OS X Help , Unix and Linux Help (Article 6980)
Tagged: bash, linux, mac os x, terminal, unix, vi
Previous: What do all the flashing lights mean on my new Apple iPod Shuffle?
Next: How do I add Windows Live Search to my Blog?

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

Your last tidbit about man pages seems to boil down to using vim (which we have on OSX in lieu of vi) as a man page viewer. It's much easier than that.

In bash:
export PAGER="col -b | vim -R -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist' -"
In tcsh:
setenv PAGER="col -b | vim -R -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist' -"

Now, just type "man bash" or whatever you want the man page for. The man command will then use whatever is in $PAGER to show you the money. Syntax-highlighted (in a good terminal) vim command friendly manpage viewer. Some people have reported weirdness with vim as their PAGER, I've never had the slightest issue. The highlights are so stinkin' handy too. If you're not seeing colored highlighting and you're using a decent terminal (xterm, dtterm, etc), make a .vimrc in your home folder ($ vi ~/.vimrc) and add this:
syntax on

You should now have color. You know, if the planets aligned properly.

Posted by: Adam Michel at November 17, 2006 3:50 PM

Thank you so much for this! I encountered that setup a long, long time ago, before I was familiar with vi. I've (long) since become a vi/vim zealot and have dreamed of finding how to do get it back.

And hey, syntax-highlighted vim-embedded man pages are teh awesome, also. :)

Posted by: Kaolin Fire at August 1, 2008 3:24 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!