Can someone :help me? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can someone :help me?

#51

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, May 27, 2014, 6:30 AM UTC

qu4z-2 wrote: post #47

VLM wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the command you're looking for is "apropos". In the modern era everyone just uses google to answer questions like that anyway, GUI or CLI. vlm@dev:~$ apropos permissions access (2) - check real user's permissions for a file chmod (2) - change permissions of a file eaccess (3) - check effective user's permissions for a file euidaccess (3) - check effective user's permissions for a file faccessat (2) - check…

Alternatively man -k permissions works for me even on some systems that don't have the apropos command.

apropos is often an alias, shell function, or script wrapper around 'man -k'.

Actually, on my Debian system, it's a symlink to whatis(1).

Re: Can someone :help me?

#52

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, May 27, 2014, 9:32 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #38

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have hit on my fundamental frustration with Unix command line. Every tool is designed around the basic assumption that the user has a couple of decades of experience and wants the tool to get out out of the way and let them work. That's great for veterans, but actively hostile to newbies. You'd think there could be some sort of middle ground.

You really don't need decades. A few months and a grounding in some basic unix philosophies is all you need to transition from Win to *nix. The CLI doesn't hold your hand like a GUI does, but it gives you oh-so-much-more power and flexibility. This is precisely why Windows developed PowerShell. In any case, there is no general-purpose operating system that is not actively hostile to new administrators. People just fo…

I can still remember learning vi, back when you had to duck dinosaurs on the way to the computer lab.

Took a couple of weeks to get comfortable with it, really only a few days to learn the basics.

No, that's not good enough for a use-it-once-and-never-again Web interface, but for an editor you'll be spending hours in daily for decades, it's entirely acceptable.

Re: Can someone :help me?

#53

Post by KhalPanda » Tue, May 27, 2014, 11:03 AM UTC

NYCHacker wrote: post #43

Can someone explain to me why people still use Vim and Emacs? Is it more efficient than GUIs like Sublime Text? I only ever use Vim for quick edits and fail to see how one can be more effective in it when you can't click and highlight text.

I just find Vim so much faster. There is a learning curve (http://www.thejach.com/imgs/vim_learning.jpg), but once you're over that curve, you can't stand regular text-editors anymore! Fewer key-presses and your hands not needing to leave the keyboard (or at least, infrequently) = fast.

I should add, I don't just use Vim, I use the IdeaVIM plugin for PHPStorm and Webstorm, for development zen. :-)