Running shell commands from the vi editor

If you are fond of vi editor or use it a lot because you have to, here is small tip that might be helpful.

We can execute the shell commands while working with the editor. To this go the command mode by pressing "esc" and to execute a shell command first type ":!" and then the command.

:! "command "

Let us say we want to look at the contents of the current working directory with out exiting the editor then we can do it as follows

:! ls