Like The Turtle

Friday 19 February 2016 at 08:00 GMT

Try to be like the turtle—at ease in your own shell.

— Bill Copeland

I've been re-learning tmux these last two weeks, living happily in my shell, with vim in a pane among a shell or three. It's been wonderful. I never want to go back to using an IDE.

To be fair, if I could get good refactoring support for JavaScript, I'd switch back in a second. But I'm pretty sure that's impossible, so I'm not too worried about anyone calling me on it. (PureScript, anyone?)

I've always been a bit of a shell nut. It makes me faster at getting stuff down on the page, which means the gaps between the important stuff—thinking and talking—are much smaller. Helps me stay focused.

If you work on Mac or Linux, I'd seriously recommend taking the time to get to grips with it. If you're not sure how to do something, don't just find a GUI to do it. Take the time, Google it and learn the tools. Read the man page. It might feel slow now, but you'll be so much faster in the long run.

If you're looking for a place to start, try the man page for grep:

$ man grep

Scroll down to the Examples section. man uses less as its pager by default in most modern operating systems, so the same keyboard shortcuts that less uses apply here. You can use your spacebar to scroll down a page, and b to scroll up. d and u scroll half a page, and I think you can guess which one does which.

When you're done, hit q to quit. You might want to open up two terminals so you can experiment.

Have fun, folks. Enjoy your weekend.