Vim on blog.iankulin.com

Bloody VIM

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient. It is included as “vi” with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X.

vim.org

You will encounter vi/vim as the incomprehensible text editor that pops up by default when you need to edit something in your sysadmin journey. Perhaps you issued the command to edit your Ansible vault, perhaps you forgot to add a message to a commit. It’s going to be unavoidable.

Here is the minimum knowledge you need to survive these encounters.

It has modes. When it opens up, you are in ‘moving around mode’. Use the cursor keys to get to where you need to.
When you actually want to edit something, press i now you’re in INSERT mode and it’s behaving how 99% of the world expect an editor to behave. When you type things, they go into the document where the cursor is.
When you are done, press escape to get out of INSERT mode, then these keys one at a time : w q

The underlying theory of Vim - that you spend more time moving around in text than editing it, is true of most sysadmin and programming tasks. So Vim has powerful, non-intuitive commands to do that efficiently. It’s impressive to watch people who have learned these arcane ways move around a file. They don’t have girlfriends. There are also powerful, non-intuitive commands for editing.

Vim

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working through the Missing Semester lectures from MIT, and recently completed the lecture about the Vim editor. Vim is a test editor, called from the command line, and optimised for programming - in the sense that it assumes most of the use of the editor is navigating around a big text file making small changes rather than entering large amount of test.

It uses simple, short key presses (as opposed to mouse movements or using menus or toolbars) to achieve things. This makes it highly efficient for good typists who know all the commands, and slightly incomprehensible to those who do not. An additional level of complexity is the idea of modes. Vim has several modes, the main ones being:

Normal - for navigating around and making those little edits. To get into this mode press the esc key
Insert - for entering text - ie the mode you’d assume you were in when opening an editor and not that you would have to press the letter ‘i’ to make that happen
Command - to run commands - like saving or closing VIM To get into this mode press the ‘:’ key

Apart from this lecture here are many good guides for learning VIM, a couple I’ve looked at are this one from OpenSource.com and this one from Stanford.

Even though I will never invest the time to become a power user of Vim, it’s available most places you’ll be using the command line, so the basics are a requirement for any programmer. Plus if you’re ever hired by a film production company to advise on a computer hacking scene, you’ll need it to scroll though some syntax highlighted Javascript.

Great cheat sheet from https://www.vimcheatsheet.com/

Gitting Started

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One of my early goals was to get in the habit of using version control with Git/Github, and I’ve got that sorted out today. My source was this excellent, very clear video from Gwen Faraday. I highly recommend it if you are just starting.

It possibly helped that I’m also on mac, so I didn’t have to deal with the “or however that’s done on your system” type problems. Also, where things didn’t work as expected, the explanation about what was being done was clear enough that the problem was solvable. For example, the push command Gwen used was:

git push origin master

but GitHub had defaulted my initial branch to “main” rather than “master”. Easily fixed since she immediately explained what both of those modifiers were. The only other tiny bit of troubleshooting was that my git global config wasn’t set up, so my commit was followed by a big message pointing out that my real email address wasn’t used for the commit:

 Committer: User Name <username@Ians-MacBook-Pro.local>
Your name and email address were configured automatically based
on your username and hostname. Please check that they are accurate.
You can suppress this message by setting them explicitly. Run the
following command and follow the instructions in your editor to edit
your configuration file:

 git config --global --edit

After doing this, you may fix the identity used for this commit with:

 git commit --amend --reset-author

It didn’t make any difference - the file I’d created locally pushed up to the GitHub repo just fine. When I did follow those instructions to edit the file, I suddenly needed to know how to use Vim (hint: “i” to go into insert mode for editing, then “:” for command mode and “x” to exit and save).

The only real complexity in the whole process was generating the SSH key and saving that on GitHub to allow the push from your local directory up to the GitHub repository.

Ignoring that, the process was:

Creating the repository via on GitHub
Using git clone to download the repository to the local machine and set it up for tracking in git
Edit/create the files, however. Gwen used Visual Studio code, I used my tools
Check status with git status
git add . to stage the new files and freshly edited files
Commit those changes with git commit -m "commit title" -m "description"
Then push them up to GitHub with git push origin main where “main” is the branch name.

All of that was by about the 25 minute mark in the video, and is probably enough for me to go away and get some practice with. The rest covers getting an already established local git repository to GitHub, branching, forking, undoing.