Which Linux tool or command is surprisingly simple, powerful, and yet underrated?"
Which Linux tool or command is surprisingly simple, powerful, and yet underrated?"
Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?
This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.
For example I'm surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.
Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.
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nano was and still is vital to me learning and using linux, I will not learn how to use vim so if the distro forces it to be default im not using it.
Why is editing text so convoluted for seemingly no reason.. also hate that vim must be used for certain files.
You can change your hate to love by using vim
one of my favorite linux youtubers is named vimjoyer so maybe one day I will try to learn it
I've liked helix a bit more. It takes less initial set up, and generally has the mentality of showing what you're about to change before inputting a change command.
I use vim mode everywhere I can and vim in the console, it took a bit of effort to learn but it was fun and satisfying. Highly recommend, I'm a vim user now for 7 years.
It's totally worth it. But be aware that you might get some :w sprinkled over your documents you are forced to write in other editors or word processors which does not speak vim...
You can change that by changing your editor global variable
It's for people to memorize hundreds of arcane shortcuts and shit so they can feel like a smug hacker and gloat over the rest of us using other editors and getting just as much done as they are.
Also for graybeards that haven't realized it's not 1985 anymore.
For the average user you're definitely right, but I will say for the sysadmin of headless systems, having a powerful cli editor is a godsend. While it may seem arcane and unnecessary, learning vim is easier than managing remote x or sshfs or copying files to and from a system.
I didn't learn vim to be a contrarian; I learned it because it seemed (and still seems to be) the path of least resistance for many workflows.
Wait until you meet an emacs user! ;p
It's for people that don't want a big bulky IDE and are willing to put a little work in to get used to it. I do all my coding in the terminal with vim and tmux and I like the simplicity and that with two dotfiles I can migrate my whole development environment to whatever PC, server or RaspberryPi that I need.
I've used Vim for some pretty non-nerdy stuff. Like ripping my DVD collection, when I got to the TV section I had a lot of file names to modify in bulk, and Vim let me do that. Also guitar tablature, the ability to edit plaintext both horizontally and vertically is surprisingly handy. Just having a macro to be able to add a bar line saves a shocking amount of time.
It was mostly a joke. I was just trying to mess with people 😉
Which I'll use as a lighthearted excuse to mention things like the block edit mode.
Wow, who hurt you? Vim is fun, and just because you can make things work without it doesn't mean it has no practical benefit. It's nice to have an editor as powerful as an IDE that doesn't require a graphical environment.
Hundreds of shortcuts is emacs, by the way. A major perk of modal editing and the vi editing language is that you can compose relatively few operations to accomplish many tasks rather than memorizing lots of more complex and specific shortcuts.
Yeah, to this day vim still isn't intuitive for me, so I just use nano as it's either often included or simple to install on most Distros.
Unless a script is hardcoded for vim I haven't had to use it.
It's weird but VIM is so powerful and I love it but i also agree it wouldn't be the default just an option if you needed it. It's like with notepad ++ on windows it's wonderful but not everyone needs it from day one notepad will work just fine for basic typing.
seems like you need to try micro. It's like nano, but with more sensible standard keybinds imho, as well as syntax highlighting and global clipboard use.
vim must be used for certain files??
Cant remember exactly but it had something to do with a file relating to sudo and it only was allowed to be edited with a vim style editor.
There's a separate command called
visudofor this purpose.You CAN use any ol' text editor but visudo has built-in validation specific to the sudoers file. This is helpful because sudoers syntax is unique and arcane, and errors are potentially quite harmful.
But visudo can use any editor if you set SUDO_EDITOR or EDITOR variables. If you don't want to use vi(m) you should probably set EDITOR in your .bashrc and visudo and probably other programs will use your editor of choice.
visudo?There may be certain times where it's all that's available, I think I remember having to edit fstab in some recovery state in vi
/etc/sudoers?
you can just edit that with nano or whatever, the visudo thing they tell you to use is goofy and I don't like it
I used nano when I started but now I am using vim for one year already. I'd recommend taking a few days where you only use vim and I think you will see why people like it. With a few motions you can be much faster than you would be in Nano.
One of the big reasons I switched to nixos is that I mostly need to use the console only for updating my system by editing the configuration file using nano. I do very little besides that thankfully while the GUI side of linux gets better everyday.
I’m using Linux since 1998 and still like nano. I can use vi, but prefer nano when it’s available.
Nano is hella confusing too. Since when is
^= Ctrl?And why dont they tell you that Ctrl+S Ctrl+C Ctrl+X works?
^C has been notation for ctrl-c for decades.
I grew up with the ^ symbol meaning CTRL. Kids these days.
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:q!