Linux

There are many shells, all of them do the same thing — they allow you to manipulate your filesystem.

I have experience with all of the major shells excluding Powershell¹. ChatGPT has written this thousand word explainer, and I have made the people orange, the places purple and the softwares blue :).

This is my favourite text editor. It was created by programmers, for programmers.

This entire site that you are visiting has been created within Emacs. On top of that, it is really not far from Vanilla Emacs, that is how powerful this system is.

I have not even been using Emacs for a year yet, I began in November of 2024. As such I hardly feel the right to comment further on this framework, but I do know it shall be one of my homes til the day I die.

I often forget many of the commands that I fought hard to learn. Here are some exported notes from my (now-archaic) VimWiki:

You should not be permitted to write production code if you do not have an journeyman licence in regular expressions or floating point math. —Rob Pike

. single character
\ escape
? optional character
* zero or more of previous
+ one ore more
| or on the word level
[] or for specific characters
^ not
\d digit
\s whitespace (tabs, carriage returns, null)
\b word boundary
\d{4} equiv \d\d\d\d
parenthesis and ? makes the stuff in parens optional
same for + and *
\w{n} n letter words
\w{n,k} n or k letter words

?*+ are "quantifiers"

To manipulate code at the speed of thought.

It is the same reason that we learn to touch-type — to write at the speed of thought.

• gg: go to the top of the file
• G: go to the bottom of the file
• b: go back a word
• f: go forward a word
• $: teleport to the start of the line, 0: teleport to the end.
• replace everything within 2 parenthesis? no worries, it's natural: change in ( = "change in brackets" – duh!

Beyond being able to manipulate code on your own computer very quickly, the benefit of learning Vim is that you can manipulate code on any machine really quickly.