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## 3 Ex Commands

In vi mode, you can execute an Ex command ex-command by typing:

    : ex-command RET

Every Ex command follows the following pattern:

    address command ! parameters count flags

where all parts are optional. For the syntax of address, the reader is referred to the reference manual of Ex.

In the current version of VIP, searching by Ex commands is always magic. That is, search patterns are always treated as regular expressions. For example, a typical forward search would be invoked by `:/pat/`. If you wish to include ‘`/`’ as part of pat you must preceded it by ‘`\`’. VIP strips off these `\`’s before `/` and the resulting pat becomes the actual search pattern. Emacs provides a different and richer class or regular expressions than Vi/Ex, and VIP uses Emacs’s regular expressions. See GNU Emacs Manual for details of regular expressions.

Several Ex commands can be entered in a line by separating them by a pipe character ‘`|`’.