Twelve Days of Shell

I've recently reached a point where I feel I've reached an upper limit with how much efficiency I can extract from my usual toolset/editors. So I've gone on a journey where I'm finally exploring tools that make living in the command line a productive and pleasant experience for me.

I've long put off learning or even exploring tmux or learning more than a few handful of vim keybinds. So I started digging into configuring them and learning them well enough to be able to regularly use them for work and personal computers.

It's been very pleasant, to say the least. There's still a few ways I need to go where I do everything from the command line and the keyboard, but I think it's worth training your muscles to be comfortable with doing things purely using the keyboard.

I've switched to vim mode for a few tools that offer it. I started seriously using vimium on chrome and firefox (a friend had introduced me to it about 7 years ago but I never cared enough to learn it well).

Another reason I finally made the jump was that I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions. While I've taken measures to improve ergonomic use of the mouse and keyboard, I'm just totally impressed with the capabilities of keyboard navigation and how much value you can extract out of your keyboard.

My friends have been egging on me about the bell curve meme, but I think it's important for me to figure out the limits and then maybe I will finally go back to defaults and simpler tools. The only way to be on the right side of the bell curve is through the middle.

I went back and forth over the years with vim. Lazyvim plus the ebook (lazyvim for ambitious devs or something like that, it’s free online) is what allowed me to stick.

I can’t be doing real work and suddenly realize I don’t know the way to do a certain basic action. Lazyvim makes it so that for everything you want to do, there’s an already configured way, and then you have all the time in the world to fiddle for a better alternative if you don’t like it.

For learning vim, I recommend searching for a "vim cheat sheet" that has an image of a keyboard layout with vim commands in it and printing that. Makes it easier to check and learn more, little by little.

Another one is online tutorials that make you practice interactively. Haven't used those much but the little I did, it was helpful.

Forget cheatsheets, tweets, videos, books, etc. Vim comes with a very well made built-in tutorial that will gently pull you toward maximum efficiency.

I love vim tutor!

I learnt the basics of vim navigation through it. I'm yet to finish it since I dropped it after the first chapter to start using it as a daily driver and picking things as I need. I will probably come back and go through it again at some point and by then it will be another mind-blown situation

been using vim for years, just did the tutorial and learned several things I did not know

Not commenting on the larger gist of the comment, only:

> I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions

If you can, try using a left-hand vertical mouse. I use an Evoluent but there are a million brands. Get a cheapo and try it out. I figure it took me about a week to adjust and my wrists have been happier ever since.

I have an odd suggestion for learning more of vim: Check out gvim.

It's vim with a GUI, dropdowns for nice discoverability and most importantly the shortcuts on each menu item are the commands to use it in regular vim. It's how I found out vim even had folding waaay back.

For Firefox, I use Tridactyl. After Vimperator died I tried several replacements and found Vimium very limited (IIRC it was the one that was just hotkeys and didn't have modes like vim, no idea how it's grown since then). I have Tridactyl configured to open gvim with the contents of any text input when I hit ctrl+i so I can use vim for them.

Vimium does have visual/caret/insert/command modes these days. Tridactyl does seem nice, I will check this out, thanks!

Shameless shill - I found Tridactyl and Vimium to be frustratingly limited due to the security restrictions imposed on web extensions, so I've been working on https://glide-browser.app/ for a while; It's a fork of Firefox with (some) vim motions and a TypeScript based config.

GNU Screen + dvtm/mtm + Vim (with some minimal plugins; especially for buffer mgmt) on a large Monitor is what you need to live on the command line :-)

Just have some minimal configs for the above and learn more of the default key bindings/behaviour etc. That way you can easily take the above setup to any machine that you move to.

Hmm. It looks like I forgot a pointer to the actual tutorial. I wasn't talking about vimtutor, which only covers very basic topics, but about the much more extensive user manual: :help user-manual.