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Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

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Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#91

Post by larsberg »

pointyhat wrote: post #30

Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.

Indeed. As part of my PhD duties, I've been the lab tutor for the first serious UNIX/systems programming course for the last three years, and I always teach vi:

ESC : q!

Because you never know when some commandline tool is going to drop you into vi (I teach them about the EDITOR variable, but sometimes you ssh somewhere and, you know...), and you need to know how to get out.

True story: the number one cause of issues with source code control systems is a vi session that the students accidentaly opened, managed to flee from with C-z, and didn't realize was still around with an open file holding the subversion lock and preventing them from committing their source code. I'd say I got 5-10 a quarter (~60 students in each quarter's session).

Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#92

Post by super_mario »

juiceandjuice wrote: post #19

Are most people not touch typers? I've noticed my boss isn't really a touch typer, despite programming since before I was born, but I always assumed the majority of CS people were.

I'm always shocked to see a developer not touch type. I just can't understand those 10% or so, that spend their life essentially editing text and yet can't touch type. It's one of those essential skills that you learn once and reap the benefits for the rest of your life.

Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#95

Post by shawndumas »

okal wrote: post #22
andrewhare wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He sounded pretty serious to me. Do you have a better suggestion? The Mavis Beacon software does a perfectly fine job at teaching touch-typing.

GNU gtypist. Got me from "hunt and peck" to touch typing with a decent wpm count within 2 weeks. Considering I used fewer than half of the tutorials, I think that's pretty awesome. It's an old GNU utility so it should be in any repos. Even had it on Cygwin.

http://www.gnu.org/s/gtypist/ has a win32 version

Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#96

Post by chalst »

super_mario wrote: post #89
chalst wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ed/ex is well worth learning. The other vi commands are less so, unless you prefer to use vim as your main editor. If you are a vim power user, finding yourself using traditional BSD vi is likely to be an unpleasant experience, making the vim is great because vi is installed everywhere weak as an argument.

Not really. VIM has vi as subset, and plain vanilla vi is still quite powerful text editor. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, and I would not choose to use it as the primary editor for all tasks, but if I'm on a system where I have to edit something using plain vi, I won't have a hard time doing it and doing it fast.

You really don't find yourself trying to use vim extensions when you use vanilla vi?

Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#97

Post by rbanffy »

FraaJad wrote: post #88
rbanffy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apt-get install gtype didn't work ;-) Googling for it led to a couple false hints, dead-ends and lots of information about viruses (not the computer kind)

gtypist -- http://www.gnu.org/s/gtypist/

Thanks!

Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#98

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Scaevolus wrote: post #20
gecko wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I don't quite grok is that, as the complexity of a given bash script increases, it moves ever-closer to looking exactly like the well-written-by-90s-standards Perl I remember from when I was just learning Unix. Given that Perl's about as ubiquitous as bash (and arguably more so, since I literally don't know any mainstream *nix that ships without Perl in the core, and I know several that ship without ba…

Learning the different things you can do with bash scripts, especially the string operations, made me a lot faster at doing batch tasks from the command-line. For longer-term scripts over a few lines, it's easier to use a powerful language you're comfortable with (maybe one of Perl, Python, Ruby) than to waste time (re)learning shell scripting whenever you need to extend the script.

Since OP's subject is becoming a better Unix hacker, I recommend staying away from Bash's more advanced (or just useful) features. The more Unix you touch, the more you realize you can't rely on Bash to work how you expect it across all different systems (if they have Bash installed). You will end up relying more on sed, awk, grep and your shell scripting will become more generic - but more portable.

On the other hand, Perl rarely changes. If you find yourself forced into a Perl 4 system you can still use the basics of Perl 5. IMO, if you have a relatively complex job to perform, Perl is going to be more reliable than Bash.

Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#99

Post by rbanffy »

sixtofour wrote: post #45
pointyhat wrote: post #30

Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.

Reply to above, and siblings. FTA: "If you learn to use Emacs, you will automatically learn the hotkeys and keybindings in hundreds of applications in Unix." His point here is not to learn Emacs because it's a good editor, but because the keystrokes transfer to "hundreds of applications in Unix." Which is true enough. In the (bash etc) shell you can change that to vi keystrokes with set -o vi, and you can change the…

> His point here is not to learn Emacs because it's a good editor,

Without starting a flamewar, I'd like to point out Emacs is a good editor.

Re: Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

#100

Post by loup-vaillant »

super_mario wrote: post #92
juiceandjuice wrote: post #19

Are most people not touch typers? I've noticed my boss isn't really a touch typer, despite programming since before I was born, but I always assumed the majority of CS people were.

I'm always shocked to see a developer not touch type. I just can't understand those 10% or so, that spend their life essentially editing text and yet can't touch type. It's one of those essential skills that you learn once and reap the benefits for the rest of your life.

This is vastly, vastly more than 10%. Where I work at, hunt & peck is the norm. Now, many hunt & peck typists I see at work type relatively fast, without looking at the keyboard too much.
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