Chanel’s Blog

Since switching to Linux, I have slowly fallen in love with Vim. I love how Vim makes it so that “your hands should never have to leave your keyboard” (Chris). The biggest drawback to using Vim, and Emacs, is that there’s a fairly steep learning curve. You pretty much have to abandon your comfort zone and force yourself to learn all of the different key bindings.

I’m very lucky in that I work with two vim gurus: Chris and Travis. Basically any question I have ever had with Vim, these two were able to answer them. But for times when they are not around I love using these sites:

• List of useful tips: http://rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html
• Wiki page of tips: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
• Cheat sheet (PDF): http://www.sm.luth.se/csee/courses/smd/139/smd139_vi.pdf
• Color coded cheat sheet of keys and their commands: http://www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif

This is a very short list because Vim is based on a few basic concepts and building on top of that. Once you get the basics, learning how to use buffers and macros gives you the ability to edit your files in any manner.

linux, programming commands, gvim, howto, linux, tips, tutorial, vim, vim commands, vim tips

Learning Linux commands is probably the largest hump anybody new to Linux faces. Over the last year, I’ve compiled some useful, and somewhat non-obvious scripts that are really helpful to me on a weekly basis. Here are commands that deal with finding files and searching for text within a file:

Find and delete a directory:

find /PATH/TO/DIR -type d -name SEARCH -exec rm -rf {} \;

Find and delete a file:

find /PATH/TO/DIR -name SEARCH -exec rm -rf {} \;

Search within files:

 grep -r "SEARCH" *.EXTENSION /PATH/TO/DIR

Find and search within files:

find /PATH/TO/DIR -name "SEARCH" | xargs -I{} grep -H SEARCH {}

For more advanced options there’s always:

man find
man grep

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