Hi everyone :)

I’m slowly getting used on how to navigate and edit things in the terminal without leaving the keyboard and arrow keys. I’m getting faster and It improved my workflow in the terminal (Yeahhii).

ctrl + a e f b u k ...
alt + f b d ...

But yesterday I had such a bad experience while editing a backup bash script with nano. It took me like an hour to completely edit small changes like a caveman and always broke the editor when I used memory reflex terminal shortcuts.

This really pissed me… I know nano also has minimal/limited shortcuts but having to memorize and switch between different one for different purpose seems like a waste of time.

I think I tried emacs a few month ago but It didn’t clicked. I didn’t spend enough time though, tried it for a few minutes and deleted it afterwards. Maybe I should give it a second try?

I also gave Vim a try, but that session is still open and can’t exit (😂 )! Vim seems rather to complex for my workflow, I’m just a self-taught poweruser making his way through linux. Am I wrong?

Isn’t there something more “universal” ? That works everywhere I go the same? Something portable, so I can use it everywhere I go?

I’m very interested in everyone’s thought, insight, personal experience and tip/tricks to avoid what happened yesterday !

Thanks !

  • @[email protected]English
    2•9 months ago

    I can never reliably cut/copy and paste what I want in Vim. I’m always either picking up or leaving behind stray characters at the edges of my visual selection, because I find the end cursor so counterintuitive.

    Especially true when newlines are involved, it’s always a mystery how many newlines I’ll paste into my document when I hit p to put.

    This is not Vim’s fault, it’s just skill issue.

    Oh, and it’s also a mystery whether the system clipboard will work properly with Vim out of the box or not. There’s some voodoo setting you have to tweak if it doesn’t.

    • @[email protected]
      2•9 months ago

      I see. Yeah, the end cursor can take some getting used to.

      The thing that always messed me up when starting out was how deleting any text overwrites the clipboard. It was an odd quirk at first but I kind of like it now.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•9 months ago

        Yeah, the notion that “cut” and “delete” are the same operation was an interesting hurdle. It’s quite elegant, honestly.

        The only thing it disrupts is the situation where you want to copy something, delete a second thing, then paste the first thing. Oops! Too bad! It’s gone now!

        I’m aware we do have access to multiple registers in Vim, effectively giving us many clipboards to bypass this, but I don’t know the commands to utilize them. Without that knowledge, this little quirk remains an occasional irritation. Just not irritating enough to motivate me enough to knuckle down and learn it.