vi in my fingertips October 27, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , trackbackI first learned to use the Unix visual editor, vi, in 1987 and it was old then. Before mouses, or even the wide range of keys on modern keyboards, vi was developed to allow files to be edited with a full screen, a huge improvement on the older line editors (ed, ex and, for dos types, edlin). All commands are via short, sometimes cryptic, keystrokes. dw deletes a word, ~ changes the case of the current character, 2>> indents the next two lines by a tabstop. If you actually want to insert text, you go into insert mode with :i. A silly game to play is to type your name in and see what happens.
A couple of weeks ago, I was offered some work supporting a website written in php and mysql. I needed to use their tool, rather than HTML-kit which I use for my own websites, and they gave me terminal access to the machine running the system. And so, for virtually the first time in 10 years, I find myself using vi again.
I still have the crib-card from my first Unix course, and started trying to remember all those cryptic commands. After an hour or so, I was stunned to realise that I was using it fluently, while barely thinking about it. Somehow, my fingers remember and that arcane, esoteric knowledge has surfaced from the dim recesses in which it had lurked all these years.
I’d forgotten how fast and efficient it is to keep your fingers on the keyboard, never moving to mouse or menu. And how satisfying it is to work on code, seeing it develop before your eyes. Its a role I’ve long moved away from, but this short interlude is deeply satisfying, like coming home.
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