You will find as you work with vi that you will often use the same vi commands over and again. Here too, vi can help. Because the named buffers are simply sequences of characters, you can store commands in them for later use. For example, when editing a file in vi, I needed to mark new paragraphs in some way as my word processor normally sees all end-of-line characters as new paragraphs. Therefore, I created a command that entered a “para-marker” for me.

First, I created the command. To do this, I opened up a new line in my current document and typed in the following text:

Para

Had I typed this from command mode, it would have inserted the text “Para” at the beginning of the line. I next loaded it into a named buffer with “pdd, which deletes the line and loads it into buffer p. To execute it, I entered @p. The @ is what tells vi to execute the contents of the buffer.

Keep in mind that many commands, abbreviations, etc., are transitive. For example, when I want to add a new paragraph, I don’t write Para as the only characters on a line. Instead, I use something less common: {P}. I am certain that I will never have {P} at the beginning of a line; however, there are contexts where I might have Para at the beginning of a line. Instead, I have an abbreviation, Para, that I translated to {P}.

Now, I can type in Para at the beginning of a line in input mode and it will be translated to {P}. When I execute the command I have in buffer p, it inserts Para, which is then translated to {P}.