good old vim

the first book i ever bought about unix was some awful "learn it in 20 days" sort of book. I quickly realized that these books were not the best to learn from. not only do they not give enough information about anything you want to do, but a lot of times the information they do give is wrong. I remember reading a book on javascript in 2000, and there was a section about setting up timer. it instructed the reader to define a variable time and set it equal to the number of seconds times 1000 that you want your javascript program to wait. Then you do something like this


for(i=0; i<time; i++){e = 'i am waiting';}


i don't even want to say why that doesn't work. it should be obvious to anyone that has been exposed to programming. how do things like that make it into publication?

Anyway... the reason that i got the book was because i had recently gotten access to a machine that was unix based (i don't remember if it was linux or freebsd or what). my only exposure to the command line was through dos, and there was something mystical about it that i liked. So i learned all of the basic commands and was able to find my way around the system. I grabbed /etc/passwd and ran a cracker on it...that was kind of cool. When i tried to edit documents with the vi or vim editor, I always got very frustrated. It seemed impossible to get anything done with this insane program that didn't tell you what you were supposed to do with it. I remember getting so angry and hitting ctrl-whatever trying to get out of the program or make the document go back to the way it was before.

Of course now i have been using it for a number of years and it is one of my favorite programs. I edit everything in vim. there are all sorts of cool little tricks you can do to make things go quicker. Someone posted a cool tutorial on it, found here. Everytime i read about it, i find something new that i didn't know about before. If your a vim fan, check out the link.