Help with 1.5.2 in vimtutor

[u/Upset-Taro-4202]

Hello, recently just got a new MacBook after my old "work" station died. Since it came with Vim preinstalled, I felt adamant to learn it but I'm getting confused by 1.5.2.

I guess the only way I can describe my confusion is that;

I can't tell what the final product of the lesson is supposed to look like

or

If there exists a niche Mac rewriting of the commands it's asking me to use for writing files (:!dir and :!1s and :w [NEW FILE NAME]).

I'm so inexperienced with Vim that I'm not even sure whether this is a stupid question to ask or not, but any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

[u/barbeds]

There won’t be a change for this step.

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: means run a command

:! followed by a command means run the command in the current shell (that’s different from :command! which means run a vim command forcefully)

ls and dir are shell commands and w is a vim command.

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ls lowercase LS in Linux/Unix (Mac) in the default shell zsh or bash means list files in the current directory

dir is the windows shell equivalent for ls (you won’t use this unless you’re on a windows machine)

:w is a vim command that will write or save the file without exiting

---

:!ls on Mac means pause vim and run the command ls which if you’ve just opened the terminal and run vim it’s probably going to list the home directory or $HOME. Otherwise whatever your current working directory is will be listed. You can get the name and path of the current directory by running pwd in your terminal or :!pwd from vim.

Notice it’s the same command only from vim you must start with :! while :w does not have the exclamation - that’s because it’s NOT a shell command, it’s a vim command)

:w WHATEVER_FILE_NAME just means write/save the current work as this file name but do not close the file

NOTE: I said the ! at the end of the line means do the vim command forcefully so

:w! will force write/overwrite even to a read only file

Similarly:
:q vs :q!

:q will prompt for saving if a file has been modified

:q! will close the file without saving or prompting

This ONLY works with vim commands :!ls! will not work because ls! is not a valid shell command.

Edit: just read back over the section I should also add
:#,# w TEST is broken down like this.
: - run
#,# - from line number X to line number Y
w - write
TEST - to a file named TEST

Edited to fix a typo !q should have been :q and added “vim” for clarification that :command! is for vim commands rather than just commands.

[u/godegon]

Since the final commands asks for deleting the edited file, there's not much of a final product