A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

[skunk]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

I tried opening kate from the command line for the remote file, but it gave me an error about not being able to communicate with the x server.

I do this all the time. It should work fine if you start the ssh client with the -X flag

[kubicle]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

I don't suppose anyone has a stupid person's guide to using vim, do they?

'vimtutor' is a good walkthrough to the basics of vim, where you can learn by doing (it includes the basics of editing). Vimtutor is in the package 'vim-runtime'.

Also, when using vim, a good vimrc file helps a lot.

[GreyGeek]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

...Is it just me, or is vim and vi a pain to use?...

It's not just you. "I feel your pain!" but I won't take you to the edge of the Galaxy to discover mine!

Vi gets high praises from folks who remember "ed", which could edit only one line of one file at a time, and had difficult to remember keyboard commands (as if Vi doesn't?). But, progress moves on and there are MILLIONS of us, even folks who've been programming for decades like me, who prefer a good GUI editor to vim or vi, or ed, which still has its proponents -- the guys who think any desktop is "bloat" and use Lynx to browse the Internet from a floppy disk based distro! (Just kidding!)

The older you get the MORE you will appreciate NOT having to remember a string of keyboard commands, like "esc + : + q + !" to exit a file, or "esc + : + w + q" to save and exit from a file. That's why, unless you have a photographic memory (like I used to have, ), you generally need to have TWO konsoles open when using a console based text editor, one to do the editing in and one to show the man pages for vi.

I want to use the keyboard Ctl + X to quit, Ctl + S to save, which is universal in all KDE gui interfaces that I use. Nothing complicated to remember. If I forget I browse the menu for a moment and see what I have to do because of the hints along side the menu options. No man pages necessary.


A lot of folks think it is smart to learn vi because before the days of GNOME and KDE most distros came with vi preinstalled as the only editor. Nowadays, most distros include a desktop and the desktop includes an editor with some degree of WYSIWYG capability. IF I have to use a konsole I'll make sure that Pico or Nano is installed and use one of them. I carry them on a USB stick, of which I usually keep two in my pocket at all times, along with a Linux distro and several other critical files I need.

[russlar]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

I've got one of these, and it's saved me a number of times while in vi.

[GreyGeek]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

I've got one of these, and it's saved me a number of times while in vi.

That way you are never without your cup of tea!

[Ole Juul]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

Vi was written in 1976 by Bill Joy. He has some interesting things to say about it, but here are a couple of quotes which caught my attention:

"I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade."

"People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore ... "

[Snowhog]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

The vi editor is different to those not used to using anything but a GUI friendly editor. vi is very powerful, and the commands it has can be quiet intimidating when you first see them. But, I like it a lot for quick and dirty 'on the fly' editing of files from the CLI.

[dibl]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

Is it just me, or is vim and vi a pain to use?

It's not just you, DK.

As noted above, vi, vim, and their kin are for a bygone era. They require a priori knowledge of the command set. You either know the commands, or else the editor is useless. One or the other. They provide you zero on-screen help, so you're lost without the cheat sheet taped to your monitor (remember the WordPerfect 3 or Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard templates?).

What Apple and Microsoft (via Xerox PARC) showed the world, in the 1980s, was that it is possible to provide Mr. Uninformed User some on-screen assistance, via a character-mode menu, and later a GUI. That was the end of the necessity for a priori memorization of obscure command sets like those for vi. It was great in its time, and it is certainly a marvel of efficiency (like Mandarin is, for Mandarin-speakers), but only for those who already have it memorized. Otherwise, it is absolutely useless.

Today's two cents' worth.

[Ole Juul]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

The vi editor is different to those not used to using anything but a GUI friendly editor. vi is very powerful, and the commands it has can be quiet intimidating when you first see them. But, I like it a lot for quick and dirty 'on the fly' editing of files from the CLI.

I can certainly appreciate why someone would like vi, but I hope you didn't think that my posting of Bill Joy's quotes meant that I was the kind of person that would use a GUI or think that a GUI was easier than a CLI. I am definitely not that person. I wanted to point out that the choices made by Bill Joy were made to overcome a network problem and not a console issue. Mr. Joy himself stated in 1984 that he no longer used vi and preferred an earlier editor called ed.

[DeathKitten]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

That vi mug seems awesome, and if I had an inclination to actually become a power vi user, I'd consider purchasing it.

I just need to figure out what command line editor I want to sink the time into getting comfortable with, and take some time with it. I need to be a command line bad ass.

It makes me feel awesome when I can run circles around my boyfriend on some computer topics. He's an Apple Care call center tech, one of the higher level ones, and he knows his ****. Before that he was a windows b*tch, so he can run circles around me there too... but lately, I've been convincing him to experiment with linux stuff, and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy when I can answer his questions.

[Snowhog]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

Death Kitten@

vi isn't as intimidating as (some) would have you believe. While it has many functions, and lot's of (arcane) commands, learning the basic ones isn't as intimidating as you might at first think. I use it to edit various system files - fstab, boot.lst (grub), interfaces, etc.

[DeathKitten]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

The thing that frustrated me with vi is that when I attempted to google up assistance, all the information I found made no sense to me. I found lists of things that were supposed to be the commands I needed, but apparently I was missing pieces of the puzzle as they never seemed to work. I'll give it another go at some point, I know there was at least one tutorial listed earlier in the thread and I'll see if I can make better sense of it.

Right now, I'm going to just worry about getting over being sick. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it throws me for a loop. Blah.

[DeathKitten]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

Well, I am about 90% through the instructions linked previously on Little Girl's Mostly Linux blog. I made the mistake of starting an update while working through the instructions once I found a command line editor I got along with (nano), and apt-get's still downloading packages because there was an update to KDE released to the ppa recently. blah. It's downloading 103 of 135 right now, then it needs to install everything.

Once it's done, I'll restart like the end of the tutorial says to, and see how it works.

[Snowhog]

Re: A birthday story in which Toshiba is Tricksy, but otherwise all is good.

Basic vi Commands

Easy to understand and with excellent examples.