VI is the most useful standard text editor on your system. To many beginners, vi looks unintuitive and cumbersome-instead of using special control keys for word processing functions and just letting you type normally, it uses all of the regular keyboard keys for issuing commands. Once you start learning, however, you realize that vi is well designed. You need only a few keystrokes to tell vi to do complex tasks. As you learn vi, you learn shortcuts that transfer more and more of the editing work to the computer-where it belongs..