So I have a hosts files on my machine that blots out ads but sometimes it causes problems with sites like flickr, etc. So I need a quick way to hose it out of the hosts file.

The DOS editor blows. So I found this neat little program called WinVi. For those unaccustomed, vi is an editing program for Unix/Linux.

So I know there were about 4,000 lines in the file. In vi you just type 4000dd. It deletes the lines. Hit the dot (.) and it repeats last command.

Then Esc:+wq! writes the file out, and quits the editor. How much better could it get.

Granted doing this in wordpad I could select one line then shift click select the last line and hit delete, then do a File/Save, File/Exit.

I prefer the keyboard.

BTW, vi dates back to when you accessed a Unix host via a dial up that was maybe 110bps or less. You had to have a shorthand to do editing.

Then some genius decided vi wasn’t good enough, so then came vim. Vim colorizes based on context which is nice.

But the malcontents out there said no and now you have emacs. I don’t use emacs nearly as much as I use vi. For quick edits you can’t beat vi.