Lab 4 - Vim

Lab 4 - Vim

Table of Contents

Part 1

I chose to do the third challenge from the lab instructions, which is described as such:

In DocSearchServer.java, change the main method so that rather than hardcoding the search on the ./technical directory, it uses the second command-line argument for the path to search

Here is the character sequence that I found that worked most efficiently:

? ” . / <return> d 2 w x x i a r g s [ 1 ] <esc> : x <return>

We’ll start off by opening DocSearchServer.java using Vim. Doing so produces the following screen, which is the standard Vim interface:

standard vim docsearchserver interface

We can then use ? ” . / <return> to skip to the first occurence of "./, which should be in line 74 (Server.start(port, new Handler("./technical/"));). Doing this produces the following screen. Notice that the cursor has moved over to the specific line.

cursor at line 74

Next, we’ll use d 2 w x x to delete the "./technical/" directory from the line. After inputting this character sequence, we obtain this:

deleted sequence

Finally, we’ll use i a r g s [ 1 ] <esc>. The i will switch Vim into insertion mode. We can then type in args[1] to map the input to the second element in the argument list. We can then use <esc> to leave insertion mode. This will produce the following:

inserted sequence

We can then exit using : w <return>. This will finally produce this message at the bottom of our screen:

write

Part 2

I tried to the sequence described above in Visual Studio code and used scp to copy the respective file onto the remote server. In total, it took me about 22 seconds. I also tried using ssh to log into the remote servers and then used Vim to edit DocSearchServer.java directly on the remote server. This took me about 25 seconds. Although Vim was slightly slower, I still believe that Vim is better and more efficient for small quick edits like what we did today. I also think that the Vim route might have been slightly slower because I am less experienced with Vim as opposed to a standard editor like Visual Studio Code. I think in the future, I might use Visual Studio Code for larger edits, but I might use Vim for small quick edits, as it may be more time efficient.