Just over two years with linux and the terminal: some thoughts and a plugin-less vimrc

So two years ago I decided to find out what linux was. Here's my first post on +Google+ 'announcing' that I was going all in and asking for some tips:

At the time I had some comments about using vim to modify my .bashrc. I politely thanked people saying that I'd look in to it and having absolutely no idea what was going on.

After a couple of weeks I had worked really hard to get a system that gave me everything that my work Windows machine did (office working, LaTeX gui setup etc). At that point I remember speaking to a friend of mine that was a hardened linux user saying: "ok, I've not lost anything since moving from Windows but what's the point? What have I gained?". My friend didn't really give me a satisfactory answer but I quite enjoy being out of my comfort zone so I kept with it.

After a couple more weeks I began to see that a big  point is the community. For anything I wanted help with I could find some people who had done it before and timidly open up this voodoo-black-magic thing called the "terminal" and paste in some code that would fix whatever needed fixing.

So at that point I thought the point was:

• It's free;
• Don't lose anything;
• Gain a community

After a couple of months of scarily copying things in to the terminal and hearing people talk about 'scripting' and various other things I thought: "Right let's give the terminal a go". So I learnt vi(m). This is old but still amuses me:

That took me a while and I was ridiculously slow at first, basically staying away from anything but insert mode and slowly learning a few new commands every now and then.

I also began to understand the point of scripting and what the "terminal" is. I now script more or less everything I do, find myself typing ':wq' in my gmail window all the time, love git and pretty much sigh every time there's a particular thing that I need to do using my mouse and a gui.

The efficiency with which I can do stuff in the terminal is completely incomparable to how I worked before. I'm still very much an amateur but I really do love the terminal (I only learnt the other day that you can middle click to paste anything that is highlighted: that blew my mind).

I realise now that the point with linux is that I don't think I was really using a computer to it's full potential before, I was just using some stuff that people had put in place for me to do some stuff (there's nothing really wrong with that, it's just a bit constraining)... I'm again in no way an expert and there's so much I still can't wait to learnt (I ticked symbolic links of the list a couple of days ago). 

The other point I think with the terminal this time (and more generally with being comfortable outside of a GUI) is that there's so much amazing software out there that does ridiculous stuff but that does not have a GUI (one reason being how long it takes to make the d**n things).

Another great thing with forcing myself to get to know linux is that I can also use all the relevant skills on a Mac. My workflow is basically a browser for my gmail and a terminal for vim so I am really happy on either machine (I prefer my linux box for the ease of getting things exactly the way I like them, while my work machines have some commercial software that I occasionally need when I get particular types of email attachments and my Imac is quite possibly the prettiest thing I've ever seen). I hear that with powershell and cygwin and things like that you can almost get a Windows box in the same shape but I can't say I see myself wanting to try that.

Using any machine becomes extremely simple. Ssh'ing in to a server is a very comfortable thing to do as all I really need is vim. To make that a bit more comfortable I've put my vimrc up on github so I can just clone that and basically be at home anywhere. Here's a bit more about my vimrc:

A basic vimrc

I really fell in love with vim about a year ago after watching +Martin Brochhaus's talk showing how to turn vim into a +Python IDE:

After watching the talk I immediately rushed off to get pathogen setup and got the various plugins Martin mentioned working. It was awesome: my vim experience with Python was ridiculously awesome. I rushed to find a bunch of LaTeX plugins and I was pretty much complete.

I've decided now though that I want to understand those things a bit better so I'm going to start from a much more basic vimrc (just with some aliases and what not) and slowly pick and choose plugins bit by bit making sure I completely understand what they do.

That vimrc is here (it's based on a bunch of stuff from the basic parts of Martin's vimrc which you can find here).

I've put this up on github in a repository I plan on growing. I've also written a simple python script that creates a symbolic link in the home directory so that I just need to keep the repositories synced on all my machines and it'll all just work. In future that python scipt will check if pathogen is setup and take care of the plugins (I think).