Lifehacker has a link this week to the UC San Diego’s Beginner’s Guide to the Vi Editor. I highly recommend that if you read it, the first thing you do is mentally replace all occurrences of Vi with Vim. Vim is Vi iMproved, and it is an awesome editor once you get comfortable with it. Spending a little time to learn Vim can have a significant gain on productivity and performance when you are doing any sort of text editing. I use Vim for just about everything, from note taking to web design (in my opinion there is no better IDE for HTML and CSS).

Once you get started, I also suggest you go here and print out the Vim cheat Sheet, which will help you remember things until you build the required muscle memory to really fly. They also have an excellent 7-step tutorial based on cheat sheets of slowly increasing complexity.

And another great beginner resource is the Vi Survival Guide. This is a good crash course in getting started with Vi, and it includes some advanced usage too.

• UC San Diego’s Beginner’s Guide to the Vi Editor [Via Lifehacker: Learn to use Vi]
• Vim Graphical Cheat Sheet and Tutorial
• Vi Survival Guide

Bookmark to:

Do you want to brush up your shell scripting skills, but can never really find a decent resource that gives you good examples? Or maybe you’ve just never had the opportunity to learn any scripting at all. Well, I just found a fantastic site that so far seems to be a really awesome review/intro/guide to Bash Shell scripting (warning: I’ve only perused the first couple of sections so far–there is a ton of information here). I don’t know how I haven’t run across this page before, because it appears to have been around for a while. The Bash shell is a standard component of just about all Linux and UNIX systems these days, and Windows users can get it with a tool such as Cygwin to get the functionality available too (I’ll be writing a guide to using Cygwin on Windows soon, but until I do, take a look at Lifehacker’s excellent Introduction To Cygwin series).

Here is a snippet from the Intro of the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide:

This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of scripting or programming, but progresses rapidly toward an intermediate/advanced level of instruction . . . all the while sneaking in little snippets of UNIX® wisdom and lore. It serves as a textbook, a manual for self-study, and a reference and source of knowledge on shell scripting techniques. The exercises and heavily-commented examples invite active reader participation, under the premise that the only way to really learn scripting is to write scripts.

The doc reads easily, and progresses fast, but doesn’t assume you are already an expert (something many books and tutorials are guilty of). It covers many topics in detail that most other documents simply gloss over. This is a good one folks, I highly recommend it.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide [The Linux Documentation Project]

Bookmark to: