A short survival guide to vi/vim for sysadmins who unexpectedly find themselves in it, such as when editing an Ansible vault or adding a message to a git commit. I cover the essentials of Vim’s modes: navigating with the cursor keys, pressing i to enter insert mode, using escape and :wq to save and quit, with a brief note on why Vim’s unusual movement-focused design exists...
Working through MIT’s Missing Semester lecture on Vim, I cover what the editor is, its keyboard-driven approach to editing, and its main modes (normal, insert, and command). I also link to a couple of Vim learning guides and argue that a basic grasp of Vim is a worthwhile requirement for any programmer, since it’s available nearly everywhere the command line is...
I set up Git and GitHub for the first time by following a video tutorial, working on a Mac. I cover the basic workflow of cloning, staging, committing, and pushing, along with minor troubleshooting around the default branch name, unset git config, and a first encounter with Vim. Generating an SSH key was the only real complexity...
