Potatowire finally leaves the crib, joining Gabe and Erik to discuss command-line text editing with vim. We learn how he started, why he uses a forty-year old text editor, and some cool things you can do when your hands never have to leave the keyboard. This is weird This is a strange episode for me. Usually I am the guy who comments from outside the conversation, and I am often the one who stitches the links and asides together with narrative. In this case Gabe and Erik asked me to come into the conversation as it happened, rather than afterwards. This also meant that I had to listen to my own recorded voice, which I usually try to avoid. Anyway, what follows is a long discussion about Vim and the terminal. I am very strong proponent about Vim, but I try not to browbeat people about it, since I know that it works best for me, and not necessarily for everyone else. Though it should be. Damn it, that slipped out. Also, if it seems like my attention occasionally wandered, my kids came home during the middle of the recording, and my daughter, in particular, thought she ought to have my undivided attention periodically. I am not a professional. Introducing Potatowire Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 0:00 “I like my friends online where I can keep an eye on them.” The story about how I became so fascinated by Vim and the command line is not terribly glamorous or interesting. I think Dr.Drang has a much better story, leaving aside some of the great material that exists from the formative years of these tools. Like many kids, I liked video games before I liked computers, and in my case, the two first became connected by the Commodore 64, which was both computer and game platform. It wasn’t really great at either function, but I didn’t know that. I loved Jumpman and Popeye, and that even caused me to dig into the Programmer’s Reference Guide to try to write my own game. Memories I may have stunted my programming growth by starting too young though, because I didn’t go back to programming again until college. It was also in college that I really realized that the command line lurked there underneath the surface of all that pretty GUI. I don’t remember what I was trying to do, but I was having some trouble accomplishing a task with the wonderful computer that I had been given, and the guy who lived across the hall from me asked me why I didn’t just do whatever it was in DOS instead of in Windows 3.11. I dug in a little, and the command line had me hooked. Similarities If a friend of mine hadn’t done exactly the same thing to me freshman year in college (and provided me with a lot of advice over the next few years) I’d be a much less capable computer user today. Fast forward to 2004, and I had a little extra money that I excitedly plunked down to buy a PowerBook G4 1.5 17”. It was a revelation. As I poked around this new-to-me OS X I discovered the hidden settings made possible by defaults write. I was in love with the command line all over again. The management regrets the error I said that I bought my new Mac in 2007, but I meant 2004. Was there something else that happened in 2007? My computer use took another leap forward in its evolution when I read a post on O’Reilly’s Radar, which has since been lost from both my mind and my bookmarks, about this editor called Vim that I really knew nothing about. This was interesting, but nothing really changed for me until I read Steve Losh’s post about Coming Home to Vim. I thought it was wonderful and compelling and I switched text editors on the spot. Section Links MacVim Dr. Bunsen - The Text Triumvirate zsh and Oh-My-Zsh Vim tmux Learning about the tools Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 11:36 tmux - The Terminal Multiplexer Tmux is a terminal multiplexer. That didn’t mean much to me when I was first told that either, but the idea is that you can have multipl
Potatowire finally leaves the crib, joining Gabe and Erik to discuss command-line text editing with vim. We learn how he started, why he uses a forty-year old text editor, and some cool things you can do when your hands never have to leave the keyboard. This is weird This is a strange episode for me. Usually I am the guy who comments from outside the conversation, and I am often the one who stitches the links and asides together with narrative. In this case Gabe and Erik asked me to come into the conversation as it happened, rather than afterwards. This also meant that I had to listen to my own recorded voice, which I usually try to avoid. Anyway, what follows is a long discussion about Vim and the terminal. I am very strong proponent about Vim, but I try not to browbeat people about it, since I know that it works best for me, and not necessarily for everyone else. Though it should be. Damn it, that slipped out. Also, if it seems like my attention occasionally wandered, my kids came home during the middle of the recording, and my daughter, in particular, thought she ought to have my undivided attention periodically. I am not a professional. Introducing Potatowire Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 0:00 “I like my friends online where I can keep an eye on them.” The story about how I became so fascinated by Vim and the command line is not terribly glamorous or interesting. I think Dr.Drang has a much better story, leaving aside some of the great material that exists from the formative years of these tools. Like many kids, I liked video games before I liked computers, and in my case, the two first became connected by the Commodore 64, which was both computer and game platform. It wasn’t really great at either function, but I didn’t know that. I loved Jumpman and Popeye, and that even caused me to dig into the Programmer’s Reference Guide to try to write my own game. Memories I may have stunted my programming growth by starting too young though, because I didn’t go back to programming again until college. It was also in college that I really realized that the command line lurked there underneath the surface of all that pretty GUI. I don’t remember what I was trying to do, but I was having some trouble accomplishing a task with the wonderful computer that I had been given, and the guy who lived across the hall from me asked me why I didn’t just do whatever it was in DOS instead of in Windows 3.11. I dug in a little, and the command line had me hooked. Similarities If a friend of mine hadn’t done exactly the same thing to me freshman year in college (and provided me with a lot of advice over the next few years) I’d be a much less capable computer user today. Fast forward to 2004, and I had a little extra money that I excitedly plunked down to buy a PowerBook G4 1.5 17”. It was a revelation. As I poked around this new-to-me OS X I discovered the hidden settings made possible by defaults write. I was in love with the command line all over again. The management regrets the error I said that I bought my new Mac in 2007, but I meant 2004. Was there something else that happened in 2007? My computer use took another leap forward in its evolution when I read a post on O’Reilly’s Radar, which has since been lost from both my mind and my bookmarks, about this editor called Vim that I really knew nothing about. This was interesting, but nothing really changed for me until I read Steve Losh’s post about Coming Home to Vim. I thought it was wonderful and compelling and I switched text editors on the spot. Section Links MacVim Dr. Bunsen - The Text Triumvirate zsh and Oh-My-Zsh Vim tmux Learning about the tools Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 11:36 tmux - The Terminal Multiplexer Tmux is a terminal multiplexer. That didn’t mean much to me when I was first told that either, but the idea is that you can have multipl