Comments on: Vim – a first

By: shorty114

shorty114 — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 18:16:48 +0000

@Gregory: Try GVim (on vim.org I believe) – not as GUI as SubEthaEdit or the like, but an improvement.

Whatever you do, don’t switch to Emacs…

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:55:59 +0000

Justin – the first livecd that has the new broadcom code in it will certainly have me there.

Pete – complex…. but I need to play and Gregory – I’ve got pspad around somewhere and that can edit directly so I ought to try that I suppose.

Oh – on the main index page, refresh, then type drunk

By: pete

pete — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:48:20 +0000

you might want to try emacs / pico / whatever other editors are on your system, but it’s probably too late (I stumbled on vim first and have never been able to get on with another equivalent since ;)

so … you’re discovering the shell, eh? Found out about the Real Ultimate Power(tm) of pipes yet? Read on …

http://www.cf.ac.uk/psych/CullingJ/pipes.html
http://www.december.com/unix/tutor/pipesfilters.html

Here’s a quick example … you might not know the command “less” which is just a little ‘output pager’ thing. Less lets you page through a large amount of text. You can use less on a text file to view it:

less myfile.txt

And, if the file contents are long enough, less will let you page up and down. Now consider this:

ls myDirWithHundredsOfFiles

This will list the directory contents, but there are hundreds of them and they whizz by too fast! You could limit ls’s output incrementally and repeat the command which would effectively let you see all the files (eventually):

ls -n 20 myDirWithHundredsOfFiles
ls -n 40 myDirWithHundredsOfFiles
ls -n 60 myDirWithHundredsOfFiles
….

But that’s crap, right? How about we *combine* the ls command with less? We use a pipe for that:

ls myDirWithHundredsOfFiles | less

Now less will happily page back and forward through the output from the ls command (rather than the content of a text file as in the original example).

Hope that helps!

Pete

(ps – “less” is so called because there was an older version called “more” …. it’s a joke, see?)

By: Justin Moore

Justin Moore — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:24:31 +0000

Vim and rm -rf are just gateway drugs to Linux. I really hope you get your wireless card issues resolved at some point so you can start enjoying ALL of the powerful stuff that *nix has to offer.

By: Gregory

Gregory — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:22:11 +0000

*twitch* Vim! *twitch*

The horror… the horror. Vim is pretty much my entire argument for a GUI ;)

I like the Unix commandline. SSH access to my host is invaluable, but I’ll be damned if I edit anything in VIM. I’ll just SFTP into my account with WinSCP and edit it on the server using my favourite windows gui texteditor (atm Editpad). It was slightly easier on a mac (Fugu and SubEthaEdit) but still… screw a bunch of Vim.

but yeah.. rm -rf, really useful.