Understanding Ex Commands

“Ex commands” are those you type starting with a colon (:). They are called “Ex” because they originate from the Ex editor, the line-based predecessor to Vi (Visual) editor.

Why do we still use them?

Vim is essentially a visual mode running on top of Ex. When you enter Command-line mode (:), you are technically dropping down to the underlying line editor.

Common Ex Commands

• :w (Write/Save)
• :q (Quit)
• :r filename (Read/Insert file content below cursor)
• :!command (Shell command execution)
• :s (Substitute)

Batch Processing

You can actually run Vim in “Ex mode” (vim -e) to process files non-interactively using scripts, making it a powerful stream editor alternative to sed.

# Example: Run a script of Ex commands on a file
vim -e input.txt < commands.vim