I’ve tried vim on and off during college but never really had the time to fully get working with it. As it turns out the stress of two degrees is not conducive to “fun activities”. Now that I have a real job ™️, I’ve decided to finally try and use it this week full stop and I genuinely feel like a programming chad. There’s still a lot I’ll need to learn and probably overtime I’ll discover some inefficiency in how I’m using it now but it really does just feel good. I understand the hype now.
I’ve always liked vim but one thing that I really loved about it was when I started using vim mode in zsh.
Being able to just navigate through commands in my terminal and easily highlight and edit and all that … it’s so good.
HOLY CRAP
Let’s say I run a command that spews output. Are you saying that with Zsh I can use only the keyboard to navigate the spew, copy a bit of it, and paste it in a new command?
If so I should try it out!
Zsh probably can’t do that, because zsh is involved with typing commands, not handling their output. You should look into the docs and settings for your terminal emulator — some of them do support selecting output with the keyboard. Alternatively, something like tmux might be able to handle that too.
Some say you don’t need it, but I personally use this plugin: https://github.com/jeffreytse/zsh-vi-mode
but I also use this: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlighting for syntax highlighting and it makes it more readable too.
I’m an emacs user myself, but if you’re not aware, readline — which handles a considerable portion of the “prompt for text” stuff in many terminal programs, like input for bash and such — can be put into vi mode.
https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#Readline-vi-Mode
Or, in ~/.inputrc:
To set the default.