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.
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 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.
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.
You can change that by changing your editor global variable
Wow you triggered a lot of vim users !
Maybe give micro a shot :) It’s nano but more sane defaults and comes with customization in mind.
vim isn’t required for any files, you just followed online tutorials for how to edit those files instead of RTFM
terminal text editing is convoluted because it has to strike a balance between figuring out when a keypress is part of the text you’re typing, vs when it’s a command you’re using, and making sure that all the editor commands the designer wanted are accessible.
vim is great because it allows for thousands more editing commands and macros, and much more customization of the editor, up to allowing plugins that emulate other functionality. As it stands, my setup basically functions as a full, lightweight-ish, multi-language IDE that rivals Emacs or Visual Studio.
On top of all that, I don’t have to move my hands away from the homerow of keys to navigate or edit, which may not seem like much, but adds up to a lot of avoid typos and time saved from moving my hands to reach the arrows/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn.
Some examples:
h,j,k,lmove left, down, up, and right respectively, but they can be combined with a number to move that many rows or columns; e.g.6jwill move down 6 rowsdddeletes a line, but using a number +d+ a movement will delete that many characters/lines in the path of the cursor: e.g.34dlwill delete 34 characters to the right of the cursor,12dkwill delete 12 lines up.ggwill take you to the first line,Gwill take you to the last, and number + either will take you to that line: e.g.3275ggor3275Gwill take you to line 3275and finally you can use
/text or regex pattern you want to search forand Enter to search the document for the first occurence below your current location, and then usento search for the next occurence, orNto search for the previousThat doesn’t even scratch the surface (that’s just the cheatsheet, which only scratches the surface), but if you can get a handle on only what I’ve said, and switching between input and command mode (
iandEscrespectively), the speedup to navigation alone will make it seem more sensible.And as always, don’t forget to
:wq(write to file and quit)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.
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.
The
EDITORorVISUALenvironment variables are usually read by command line tools to launch your preferred editor. You could setVISUALtonanobefore launching visudo and you would be editing the sudoers file in nano.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.