"The other day I asked what folks on Mastodon find confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was "editing a command you already typed in".
This really resonated with me: even though entering some text and editing it is a very "basic" task, it took me maybe 15 years of using the terminal every single day to get used to using Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of the line (or Ctrl+E for the end)."
Only took me a year or so to get used to using "v" in vi mode and fc. I am not a "developer" but I prefer textmode command line to GUI. I do not use X11/Wayland/etc.
I learned sh on NetBSD which I still think is one of the best shells available. It's fast. vi mode is the default. People may disagree but I think for editing single a line of text, i.e., a "command", vi mode offers more precision. For example, being able to jump directly to a particular column number.
It's been mentioned here before, but you should suggest the Ctrl + X, Ctrl + E combo - they can edit the command in their favourite text editor and then it gets executed when they exit the editor.
going to a particular column number is not useful to me because my commands are not on punched cards with column numbers printed on them. going to a particular piece of text is, and ^r or ^s gets me there with readline (in vi mode or emacs mode). i don't want to mentally count how many characters are on the line before the place i want to go; i have a computer to do that for me
vi movement by words is useful though, and slightly easier than emacs alt-f and alt-b
Ctrl+T does transpose-characters (and Alt+T transpose-words) in Emacs. I assume it's not a coincidencce, I see tcsh has `bindkey -e` / `-v` for Emacs/VI bindings. Same keys work in bash too (and anything else that uses readline) and fish too (independent editing implementation).
This really resonated with me: even though entering some text and editing it is a very "basic" task, it took me maybe 15 years of using the terminal every single day to get used to using Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of the line (or Ctrl+E for the end)."
Only took me a year or so to get used to using "v" in vi mode and fc. I am not a "developer" but I prefer textmode command line to GUI. I do not use X11/Wayland/etc.
I learned sh on NetBSD which I still think is one of the best shells available. It's fast. vi mode is the default. People may disagree but I think for editing single a line of text, i.e., a "command", vi mode offers more precision. For example, being able to jump directly to a particular column number.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240528201424if_/https://pubs.o...
IMO, as a dumb computer user who is not a "developer", this is not complicated. I think terminal emulators are complicated, though. I do not use them.I believe fc came to POSIX from ksh.
For me, it is not that UNIX is objectively good. It is that the available alternatives are still comparatively bad.