[CentOS] Setting Abbreviatons In .exrc Problems

Sat Apr 15 14:16:59 UTC 2006
Mark Sargent <powderkeg at snow.email.ne.jp>

Hi All,

I'm trying to get vi to display an ab like so,

ab htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
\<html>
\<head>
\<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type">
\<title>NewUser</title>
\</head>
\<body>
\</body>
\</html>

but, when I input the text htm and press the spacebar, I get the following,

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 
Transitional//EN"><html><head><meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" 
http-equiv="content-type"><title>NewUser</title></head><body></body></html>
 
not the desired result. If I remove the leading backslashes, I get 
errors when starting vi,

[racket at ibmlap htdocs]$ sudo vi newuser.php
Error detected while processing /home/racket/.exrc:
line   26:
E488: Trailing characters: <html>
line   27:
E488: Trailing characters: <head>
line   28:
E488: Trailing characters: <meta content=
line   29:
E488: Trailing characters: <title>NewUser</title>
line   30:
E488: Trailing characters: </head>
line   31:
E488: Trailing characters: <body>
line   32:
E488: Trailing characters: </body>
line   33:
E488: Trailing characters: </html>
Hit ENTER or type command to continue

How do I get the desired result? Cheers.

Mark Sargent.