[lug] Few vi problems

[John Starkey]

Can someone help with this? I've looked through every vi manual I could
find online and in :h

I need to yank x chars from some code. yw isn't gonna work because of
the chars. Optimally I'd like to be able to grab:

<td bgcolor=" <.?php $bgcolor ?> ">
                       ^                            ^
The spaces between the carrots is what i need to yank and paste.

The next question: I'm on a remote FreeBSD virtual server. I've tried
every .* file I could think of (.vimrc, .virc, .exrc) and couldn't get
it to load in my vimrc. Is there a way to specify the rc file path in
vi? And on a related note, is there a way to specify the syntax file
path?

Thanks,

John