• Gustephan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The only reason I like vim is because I’ve literally never seen a Linux installation that didn’t have vim. As a result, I know like 5 whole vim commands so I can still technically function on bare-bones installations. And even then, I only learned those 5 vim commands the first time I ran into a computer that didn’t have nano or pico

    • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net
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      1 year ago

      Additionally, vim key bindings work in some other places too - like man and less (and most pagers I think). It also works in bash if you set -o vi which by default uses emacs keybindings. Ctrl+x, Ctrl+e (Shift+V in vi mode) to open your current entered command in $EDITOR which is handy for really long commands. Then save it in said editor, and boom - it runs in your shell.

      The keybindings (vim and emacs alike) is actually a feature of GNU’s readline library that bash gets for free since it uses it, the same trick works in other places that use the same library like a lot of REPLs and gdb (though those programs would need to expose their own way to change between vi and the default emacs mode).

      That itself is a very good reason to know some basics of how to navigate around emacs and vi[m]!

      • Gustephan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And now for the second time in my life, I’m tempted to learn a bit more about the old gods of text editing. Damn you! /s