Editing tips and techniques

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

Two of the areas I have followed over the course of my professional career, and to a somewhat lesser extent in retirement, have been the use of — and various lesser known things — about common text editors and Web Browsers. These are two of the most commonly used tools, especially for anyone who has either developed, maintained, or tested software at some point in time. Though it’s now been a few years, I have been a developer, maintainer, and tester of software throughout my professional career.

This “fixation” on text editors and Web Browsers is somewhat of a hobby, though less so than in the past. I just happened to notice one of my old links in my Tools browser tab, Interactive Vim Tutorial, http://www.openvim.com/tutorial.html.

The following discussion only gets into a couple of editing tools and does not directly dig deeply into web browsing:

Noticing the Vim tutorial bookmark led me to go out on a search to see if there is any video content out there. As you would expect in this day and age, there is indeed plenty to read and see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ZbrtoSuzw
is a talk sponsored by Yelp entitled “Going mouseless with Vim / Tmux / Hotkeys”.

Not everyone will be interested in this, but I assure you, if you want to develop techniques that greatly improve your practical workflow, especially if you do any coding, but it may improve your productivity in other areas as well. It is on the long side, 57 minutes and 27 seconds, but you may be able to “trim” some of that and still pick up some valuable tips.

The next video discusses another well-known editing environment to long-time UNIX and Linux users, the Emacs editor, but this one goes well beyond just the default Emacs, it gets into the addition of Spacemacs with Emacs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCNOB5jjtmc

There are a LOT of Emacs tutorial videos available. If you are interested, rather than endlessly copy and paste references, I’ll share the exact search I used to find a LOT of them – some are good, but the overall quality of the video help varies considerably.
Using the DuckDuckGo search tool @ https://duckduckgo.com/ I entered the exact phrase
GNU Emacs editor interactive tutorial in the search form and many video tutorials are available.

The official Emacs Guided Tour is at
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

A tutorial which states: “Emacs Editor Tutorial – An Absolute Beginners Reference” can be found at

https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/emacs-editor-tutorial

That is more than enough to digest. If you really want to get into two of the most powerful text editors, Vim and Emacs arguably qualify. I find them useful in different ways, though these days there are enough extensions and tools available on top of the core editors that, regardless of your level of experience with either of them, I can guarantee you that there are features that you have never explored in either of them, even if you are a veteran user of one or both editors. So there is plenty to learn here. If you are a novice, go slowly and do not attempt to digest too much too quickly. Both of them have a few features to help you “get going” so you do not have to be an expert immediately.

One thing I can guarantee you is that you can definitely use either editor to write documentation, code, or most any task commonly handled by an editor. A simple console editor like nano might be a quick way to get going, a nice editor like Geany is certainly capable of doing a lot of useful things, but these two editors are capable of generating productivity tools in addition to editing text, and I suspect that only a small minority of people understand the depth of the potential they can harness for you. If this is too much, just ignore this entire discussion, but if you want to get deeply into two of the most creative pieces of application code that began as editing tools, you arrived at a topic that might change the way you do certain things.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

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