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.
one of my favorite linux youtubers is named vimjoyer so maybe one day I will try to learn it
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.
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.
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.
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 visudo
for 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.
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
,l
move left, down, up, and right respectively, but they can be combined with a number to move that many rows or columns; e.g. 6j
will move down 6 rows
dd
deletes a line, but using a number + d
+ a movement will delete that many characters/lines in the path of the cursor: e.g. 34dl
will delete 34 characters to the right of the cursor, 12dk
will delete 12 lines up.
gg
will take you to the first line, G
will take you to the last, and number + either will take you to that line: e.g. 3275gg
or 3275G
will take you to line 3275
and finally you can use /text or regex pattern you want to search for
and Enter to search the document for the first occurence below your current location, and then use n
to search for the next occurence, or N
to search for the previous
That 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 (i
and Esc
respectively), the speedup to navigation alone will make it seem more sensible.
And as always, don’t forget to :wq
(write to file and quit)
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.
Nano is hella confusing too. Since when is ^
= Ctrl?
And why dont they tell you that Ctrl+S Ctrl+C Ctrl+X works?
As for why: arbitrary choice, they just needed a printable character they could show on screen, for when people pressed it and the terminal echoed it back out to them.