- Meetup Event: https://www.meetup.com/data-umbrella/events/274778387/
- Video: https://youtu.be/y4fYxmE0HZM
- Slides: https://github.com/nickjj/nyhackr-cli-dev-env/blob/master/nyhackr-cli-dev-env.pdf
- GitHub Repo: https://github.com/nickjj/nyhackr-cli-dev-env
- Transcriber: ?
- NOTE TO EDITOR: these timestamps should be incorporated into the transcript as paragraph headers. (They have been reformatted into list items for proper parsing.)
- Intro: 0:00
- What we're going to cover: 7:14; Talk starts
- A few practical demos of using tmux, vim and other tools: 9:44
- Parsing CSV sales data on the command line using a few Unix tools: 16:48
- Picking a terminal on all major operating systems: 23:44
- Comparing shells (sh vs bash vs zsh vs fish): 25:55
- Configuring your Bash profile: 29:22
- Configuring and accessing your Bash history: 32:29
- Creating and using Bash aliases: 33:58
- Configuring your prompt (including ANSI escape codes and git branch): 36:48
- Efficiently searching your Bash history with CTRL + r and FZF: 43:25
- Setting a Shebang and striving to be POSIX compliant: 47:39
- Using and configuring tmux: 49:42
- Rapid fire descriptions of a few useful Vim plugins that I use: 1:03:32
- Going over what dotfiles are and how to install + configure everything: 1:08:00
- Main takeaway of the talk: 1:13:35
- Questions and answers: 1:14:46
Hello everyone and welcome to our Data Umbrella webinar this is our first webinar of 2021. I'm going to do a quick
introduction and then Nick will do his talk and we'll open it up for Q&A you can also ask questions in the question tab
throughout the presentation and we'll sort of break whenever it's a good time to break and this webinar is being
recorded Data Umbrella is an inclusive community for underrepresented persons in data science and we are volunteer run a
brief couple of things about me I'm a statistician data scientist and I have an ms in masters in statistics and an mba
from NYU and I am the founder of Data Umbrella if you are interested in learning more about what I'm doing you can
follow me on Twitter LinkedIn or GitHub I have the same handle raishma s we have a code of conduct here and we're really
really intentional about providing a respectful welcoming professional environment so please make sure that you follow
our code of conduct it's listed on our website and also this applies to the chat as well so please you know be
professional about what we post on the chat so the ways to support our community is the most importantly as I said
following our code of conduct we have a discord channel the link is on our website and so it's a great place to ask and
answer questions there if you want to share events through your community there that's a good place to do it and we have
for all of our events we record them and we have a list of transcripts on our GitHub repo so if you would like to help
us edit it feel free to email us and I also have detailed instructions on how to go about doing that another way that
you can support us is donate to our open collective it helps us cover operational costs such as Meetup dues and other
other operational costs and we greatly appreciate your support we are on all social media platforms as Data Umbrella so
the best place to find out about upcoming events is on our Meetup group all of our events are posted as I said on the
video library on Data Umbrella we have a job board as well and a newsletter which goes out once a month and we have
resources on our website website related to diversity alice allyship inclusive language and more on our video library on
YouTube we have a playlist for contributing to open source and so we have for the library is numpy scikit-learn Pandas
and core Python there are some videos so you know for those of us in data science open source is critical and it's a
good way to figure out and learn how you can contribute we also have a playlist on career advice we have three speakers
who've done a really informed really done informative talks about it so if you are looking for career advice please
check those out this is just a small screenshot of some of the events that we have on our YouTube so check it out
depending on what topic you're interested in our job board is jobs at jobs.dataumbrella.org if your company is hiring
they can post jobs there and we can share it with our community on in our newsletter as well as in upcoming webinars our
highlighted job that we have is cloud infrastructure engineer at coiled and it is a distributed infrastructure so feel
free to check that out to learn more about the position this is just a list of some of the resources that we have on our
website open source guides to using inclusive language how
people can be allies how to handle burnout and resources for AI ethics as I mentioned before we're on all platforms
under Data Umbrella so depending on your choice whichever platform you prefer to you prefer to use follow us on that
platform I want to share some upcoming events that we have we have intro to sphinx for Python documentation presented by
Melissa weber and that is on January 28th and the link to that to sign up is on our Meetup page we have our flagship
event for the year which is a scikit-learn open source sprint this this sprint is focused on participating getting
participants from the regions of Africa and middle East and so if you're in those regions please check out our website
it's afme2021.dataumbrella.org if you have any questions feel free to email us the information about contacting us is on
the application form on the website there's also want to share a community event that's coming up which is global
diversity cfp day and the goal of this event is to provide resources for underrepresented or marginalized groups in tech
to submit pf cfps and get started speaking at Meetup events and conferences and there are live streams there are six
different live streams for different regions in the world and there's some great talks and workshops coming out the
website is globaldiversitycfpday.com feel free to check that out and I want to now introduce our speaker for this event
it is Nick giannitakis and Nick is a developer and cis admin he is an independent freelancer course creator and host of
podcasts running in production he has hundreds of blog posts blog posts and YouTube videos focused on building and
deploying web apps as along with development environment tips I reached out to Nick because you know studying using the
command line is a really really useful skill for data scientists and I think it's really going to be beneficial to
people in our community whether they're aspiring data scientists or experienced practicing data scientist and you can
find Nick and more information on Nick's website Nick johnnytakis.com and GitHub is at Nick jj and Nick is also on
Twitter as at Nick jonatakis and with that I am going to turn the camera and microphone over to Nick OK thank you for
the introduction let me just share my screen really quick do you see anything it shows your slides by the way just a
heads up here we go OK so everyone can see this now I hope so hey everyone thanks a lot for coming my name is Nick
genitakis and today we're going to go over creating a command line driven development environment by the end of this
talk you'll be well on your way to having a tricked out terminal along with being familiar with tools like tmx and vim
and also being comfy using command line tools to solve real world problems we're also going to go over how you can
manage your dot files these are files that typically live in your home directory and are responsible for configuring a
bunch of command line tools just a heads up everything we go over today is going to work on all major distros of Linux
macos and Windows 10. in the case of Windows it will be expected that you're using wsl1 or wsl2 which is the Windows
Windows subsystem for Linux that's because we're going to focus on shell scripting in a unix or unix-like environment
not so much powershell also we're going to cover a lot of ground in this talk but don't worry I'm not going to leave you
hanging on installing and configuring everything on your own from scratch so feel free to check out this get repo
afterwards it has a very skimmable reference for everything we're going to do as well as this slide deck you can just
download it there as well with that said let me quickly introduce myself my name is Nick genitakis and I've been a
freelance developer for the last 20-ish years and I would say for the last seven or so years I've been doing a lot of
devops work that's mainly setting up Linux servers working with various cloud hosting providers deploying code writing
shell scripts and using tools like docker ansible and terraform now the specifics aren't too important but I do think
working with a bunch of different technologies and projects has led me to having a command line focused development
environment now chances are you're not going to be using the same exact tech stack as me but we can all use the same
command line tools to solve our unique problems for example I found myself bouncing around so many different freelance
and open source projects and I wanted a way to quickly switch between them to get right back into our project as if I
never left that led me to discovering tmux and eventually vim and by the way if you decide you don't want to use vim as
a primary code editor that's completely fine I only started using vim about two years ago mainly because the combination
of using it with tmux really let me quickly switch between projects on the command line but even if you don't use vim
there's so much more to the command line than cone editing and tmux is really useful on its own in any case now before
we dive into the basics of using tmx and other tools let me quickly go over a couple of practical examples of how I use
tmux vim and various command line tools in my day to day I'm going to blaze through this without explaining everything
in detail so you can get a high level overview of how everything fits together and see what types of workflows you can
create this way you can start thinking about how all of this applies back to your end your dev environment then after
that we'll go back and cover how everything works and how everything can be configured in more detail also just a heads
up for the sake of time and avoiding silly mistakes like typos I decided to go with animated gifs for demoing a few
things that means you'll occasionally see animations that are looping indefinitely and they may not line up exactly with
what I'm saying but I think you'll get the gist of it lastly feel free to ask questions if anything isn't clear because
I am prepared to jump into a live terminal if needed let's do this so here's a brand new terminal that I just opened and
let's say I want to start working on the source code to my Flask course which is a web application running in docker I
was working on that last night but today is a new day instead of opening everything from scratch I can attach to a tmx
session that's running in the background it already has vim open with the last file I was editing along with the entire
app running inside of docker it's like I never left I can immediately get back into the deck of it next up let's say I
want to do a project-wide search for all the tests in the project I can do a search for the test underscore string in
vim and it'll do a fuzzy search and list all the matches also instead of a string I could have used a regular expression
after that vim will present me a way to filter and select the matches I want and it even shows a little preview of the
file as I cycle through the matches my font size is massive for the sake of this talk but normally you can see a lot
more of the file in the preview then from here I can pick a file and it opens in the main buffer if I want to look at
multiple files at once vim makes it easy to open horizontal and vertical splits it looks a little cramped here because
the font size is so large with my normal setup I can fit four 80 character width files side by side
on a 2560x1440 monitor running at one to one scaling also I didn't show it there but it's really easy to switch between
the different splits using hotkeys or the mouse now let's say that you want to open a different set of files but you
don't want to lose your existing layout of files with a vim you can open files in a new tab and this tab becomes a
bucket to hold as many files as you want then you can switch between tabs up top using hotkeys or the mouse so let's say
we did some work and now it's time to commit our changes I can hop over to the second tmux window on the bottom open a
split and make my git commit message as an aside tmux also supports horizontal and vertical splits I also like using vim
for writing commit messages because it helps me adhere to best practices such as warning me through syntax highlighting
if the first line is too long or if I have any typos next up let's say you have a few tmux splits open and you really
want to view the log details in full size but you don't want to close your existing splits tmux lets you zoom in and out
of any split you want it's I'm just hitting a hotkey there to toggle the zoom in and out also it's worth mentioning you
can do the same thing with vim splits too I didn't show it for the sake of time and just as a reminder we're going to
see how to do all these things later on when we dive into the details next up let's say I want to jump to a completely
different tmok session in this case it's my podcast site and maybe I came here to add a reference link or something like
that after doing whatever I needed to do I can jump over to the second tmux window on the bottom and deploy the site
with ansible ansible's deploy command is kind of long and I don't want to have to hit the up arrow 100 times to find it
so I can reverse search my history using the same tool that we saw in fim to fuzzy search through files in a project
this tool is called fcf by the way lastly here's a quick demo of doing GitHub style Markdown previews in vim technically
it's not real time since it's not updated on every character press but you can turn that option on if you want I keep it
off for performance reasons instead it updates every time I switch vim modes or save the file also on the right vim puts
aaron's exclamation points near the line count that's to let me know that these lines have changed based on the most
recent git commit it'll show new lines and deleted lines with different markers too honestly we could spend the whole
hour looking at vim and tmux features but there's so much more to the command line than using vim so let's switch gears
and go over a few practical examples of using command line tools for example let's say that I'm working on something and
it sparks an idea for a blog post I can just run a custom script I created called drafts and start typing whatever I
want after running that command it automatically creates a date labeled file in my personal website's drafts folder if I
rerun the same script it opens the file in vim so I can start fleshing out the draft right now that's typically what
happens in practice this might seem like such a minor thing but it really helps remove friction when starting new blog
posts because the tool I use to build the blog expects files to be in this dated format not having to create this file
manually means it's one less thing I need to think about as for the draft script it's a simple script and don't worry if
you can't read the text the real takeaway here is the command line is there to help you solve whatever unique problems
you have it's almost like a direct link to your brain except you just have to type what you want instead of just
thinking it for now in another example I created a script to toggle dark and light mode for my terminal tmux vim and
other tools I prefer using light themes in my day to day but after running a poll I found most folks like seeing a dark
theme in my video tutorials so with the script I can quickly change between the two it's open source and my public dot
files and we'll take a look at that later in one more example let's say I was heading over to New York City later
tonight and I wasn't sure if I needed a really heavy jacket because I live 90 minutes away and weather is crazy like
that not a problem I can just run weather nyc and
that's what we see here there's almost a tool for everything in this case the weather command is a very simple function
I set up to curl wttr.in which is a website that shows you the weather in a browser but it's also optimized for
displaying the weather on the command line there's also dozens of general purpose unix tools that you can use to solve
problems around processing and filtering text I I'm trying to keep this folks talk focused on workflows and more
generally your development environment but besides using tmx and vim piping together a few unix commands and writing
your own scripts to solve your specific problems is a huge part of using the command line it becomes another tool at
your disposal with that said let's take a couple of minutes and go over one example of doing this so imagine if you have
a csv file with a bunch of transactions in it and you want to extract that information like how much money you generated
but also have an ability to filter the results on specific product names date ranges and so on the csv file we're
looking at here is a simplified version of a csv that my course platform spits out with a bit of anonymized data in
practice you'll find payment gateways like stripe and paypal supplying your transaction information in csv files so this
is a real world use case as an aside vim has a plugin to help view and display csv data and we'll go over that in a
little bit but viewing this data isn't super useful typically I want to figure out things like how many courses were
sold this month and have an ability to filter the results by course name and so on and that begins with removing the csv
headers said stands for stream editor and in practice it's a very useful tool for doing a find and replace in text but
in this case we're using it to delete the first line in the file the 1d part stands for delete the first line if we
swapped out the one with a two then the first two lines would have been deleted instead one neat thing about the command
line is there's often more than one way to do something if you googled around for how to delete the first line in a file
you'll find all sorts of different answers and most of them will probably work for example we could have used the tail
command and passed in these flags to get the same exact result technically tail is faster than set on Linux but it's
also slower on Mac OS by default at least according to stack overflow although I find the tl version to be less readable
for this type of use case it's confusing because plus one actually outputs the entire file so we need to offset what we
want by one and then there's also differences between using one and plus one one takeaway here is you should be mindful
of performance but readability almost always wins especially if the performance difference isn't worth anything
considering for example if we had thousands of rows and the said version finished in five milliseconds but the tail
version finished in 3 milliseconds it doesn't really matter for a script that I run once a month on my dev box but I
will remember what 1d does instead 3 months from now which has way more value in the end as an aside tail is still a
great tool if we wanted to get the last line or last couple of lines of the file then tail is for sure the way to go
here you can even have tail watch a file for changes in real time and output new lines as they come in that could be
really useful for monitoring web server logs but moving on we're going to use the said version and the next thing we'll
want to do is filter out a specific column of data this column is the net amount of sense and it's the thing we want to
sum up in the end unix was invented a long time ago but they made some great design decisions such as being able to pipe
the output of one program as input into another and you'll also find that text streams are the protocol that most unix
commands use that means most command line tools expect text as input and produce text as output this is remarkably
powerful because suddenly it means you can combine hundreds of tools in a number of different ways to solve
very specific problems that you might have and unix pipes are the secret sauce that lets us send the output of one
program as input to another pipes are defined with the vertical line and you can see that they are sitting in between
said and cut that means in this case the output of the set command is now being fed in as input to the cut command and
this cut command is going to delimit the output by a comma since this is a csv file and we want to grab the fifth column
which is the net amount in cents if we ever wanted to calculate the transaction fees for a specific payment gateway then
we can change this five to a four and now it would get the previous column which are those fees and this is why command
line tools are amazing we get to break down the problem into bite-sized chunks and then work on only a very specific
tiny problem at hand I think this fits the functional programming model very nicely speaking of which a lot of
functional programming languages also have the idea of a pipe operator where you can send the output of a function as
input to another function it's a great way to break up a problem next up now that we have a list of amounts we'll want
to sum them up but before we can sum them we need to transform the list of numbers into a math equation that adds each
value for that there's the paste command and don't ask me why it's name paste because I have no idea it has nothing to
do with your clipboard all I know is when we use these flags it becomes what we see here if you wanted to do something
else like subtract the values then you can replace the plus at the end with a hyphen and technically you can use this
paste tool for anything it's not limited to math if we put an underscore instead then it would delimit them with that by
the way the dash d is the delimiter and dash s puts everything onto one line and now that we have our equation ready to
go we can use the basic calculator command aka the bc command to sum them all up and there we go we solved our problem
by piping together a few commands in practice when you're more familiar with these commands you can create pipelines
like this in a few minutes by the way there's a gacha here too with the bc command if you ever want to support floating
point numbers you'll need to add the lflag to it I didn't add it here since we're dealing with summing whole numbers so
there's never going to be a decimal point next up let's filter the results by a specific course by using the grep tool
this is a tool you'll likely find yourself using all the time you can provided a text stream or a file and then we can
match whatever search string we want in our case it's a regular expression that makes sure comma bsawf is at the very
end of the line this is nice because it means we no longer need to use the set command to chop out the first line since
this grep pattern will only ever match csv rows that have this specific text and then from here we can use what we did
before to sum up the net sales and suddenly we have the total sales for a specific course I also decided to throw in two
more examples here at the end the first one lets us count the number of sales for a specific month here we just take the
output of what grep produces and pipe it into the word count command the l flag counts the number of lines instead of
words alternatively grep has a c flag to get a count of the results instead of returning each match on a new line in
practice I would use this second command if I wanted the count it's less typing less overhead and more straightforward
to read so that's a mini crash course in combining a couple of commands together to solve a real world problem the cool
thing is if you find yourself writing scripts like this and they start to get a bit unwieldy then you can put them into
a dedicated script file and run them like that we'll talk more about shell scripts a bit later on and that leads us into
the next part of this talk we just covered a bunch of practical workflows and examples of using the command line now
it's time to get into the details about setting up your development environment and that begins with picking a terminal
and configuring your shell we're going to spend quite a bit of time
on this because it's pretty core to your environment the interesting thing about tmux by the way is it gives you tabs
splits and a way to search up and down a buffer in any terminal this allows us to pick a terminal that focuses on speed
and having the least amount of input latency when you press keys you can al you can also optimize for quality of life
enhancements too like customizable hotkeys easily being able to zoom in and out being able to click URLs and also have
solid unicode support for displaying icons and emojis if you're going to be spending a lot of time typing something in
the command line it should feel really good and make you happy while doing it for example I'm using Windows and the
Microsoft terminal has really really low key press latency it's like night and day compared to most other terminals on
Windows I tried a whole bunch and the other one that came close was wsl tty but I've gone with the Microsoft terminal
because it's more integrated with being able to easily switch between wsl distros as for anyone running native Linux
xterm is a very lightweight terminal and that's pretty much the lowest input latency that I've ever encountered on any
os also with a bit of configuration it's all the marks for the quality of life improvements I do run native Linux on a
modified chromebook and that always amazes me at how nice the terminal experience is for Mac OS to be honest I am not
100 sure since I have no first hand experience but I've heard really good things about item 2 so I might want to start
there if you want to give it a shot in addition to that there's cross-platform terminals like alacrity which is
something you may want to check out too but personally on Windows and Linux I've always used the Microsoft terminal and
xterm and I think the takeaway here is it doesn't matter too much on which terminal you pick because tmux brings a lot
to the table so just stack up on speed and quality of life improvements and I wouldn't worry about too much about having
native terminal support for things like tabs splits and searching next up it's time to pick a shell and your shell
provides a command line interface to your operating system it's both interactive and it can be used as a scripting
language right now I happen to be running bash and you can check which shell you're currently running by running echo
dollar sign zero there's also dollar sign shell too but this is technically the default shell for your system or user
not your current shell to help clarify that another shell is sh which is the bourne shell and it was released way back
in 1979 if you're curious its successor bash stands for the born again shell and that was released about 10 years later
in 1989 but just because I'm running bash here doesn't mean I can't use the original boring shell you can run it by
running sh notice how the prompt changed and now running dollar sign zero returns sh instead of bash but dollar sign
shell still returns bash because for my nic user on the system bash is set as the default typically in modern systems
you wouldn't use sh as your interactive shell in your day to day it's missing very nice to have features like being able
to tap complete commands or use the arrow keys to move the cursor around however when writing shell scripts it's often a
good idea to target your scripts for the shell since it's the most compatible across systems although there's not too
much harm in targeting bash2 because it's available on most Linux systems and Mac OS we'll talk about shell scripting in
a bit but for now let's focus on the shells themselves besides sh and bash there's also newer shells such as z shell
which is labeled as zsh just like bash extended the original boron shell z shell extends bash personally I'm not a huge
fan of it but it's not because it's bad or I have anything against it I'm just content with bash and I don't really feel
like I'm missing out on anything at the moment by the way it's worth pointing out if you're running a modern version of
Mac OS if you follow along before and you ran the echo dollar sign zero command chances are you saw z shell as your
shell that's because Mac OS made it the default shell in the catalina release back in 2019 but even so bash is still
available to be run
on Mac OS next up there's fish which is an even more recent shell and it stands for friendly interactive shell unlike z
shell fish is not compatible with sh or bash because the creators thought certain design decisions from back in the day
were poorly designed so they went their own way honestly this shell isn't for me mainly due to that lack of
compatibility but it might be OK for you it has a lot of the out of the box features like auto suggestions but you can
also get that to work with other shells too it just takes a bit more effort with that said at least now you know these
options exist we only have so much time here so we can't spend a ton of time breaking down the pros and cons of each
shell but overall your shell is there to make it a pleasant experience to use your system from the command line if
you're curious now you can Google for things like bash versus z shell versus fish and you can make an informed decision
just be aware that this is an excellent topic to get lost in yak shaving or bike shedding in other words you can spend a
lot of time here and not wind up with a lot of games the real gains come from learning how to create tools that help you
solve your exact problems and getting comfy with workflows that let you do whatever you need to do quickly it's not a
life or that death decision either you can always switch your show later on without too much fuss so that's a basic
rundown of shells since I happen to use bash let's go over how I have it configured although in a lot of cases even if
you plan to use z shell or phish most of what we're about to cover still applies most shells have a few config files in
your home directory with bash you'll have at least the bashrc file and maybe a bash under skype underscore profile too
in my case I decided to rename my bash profile to profile so that it'll work with any shell although technically this
profile file has one line in it that's specific to bash so it's not entirely portable across all shells with that said
let's take a look at this file just a heads up before we get into this I'm only going to be showing a few lines at a
time so it's easier to talk about this entire file along with all of my config files are in my dot files repo on GitHub
and we'll cover that near the end as for this profile file it runs once when you log into your system so it's a good
spot to put things that don't change very often for example I modify my path here so that any executable scripts or
binaries that exist in my home directories dot local bin directory are available to run without supplying the entire
path that's how I ran that draft script from before it exists in my dot local bin directory and I can run it like any
other command that's already on my system path like rep ls and some other commands that we took a look at before this is
also where I like to set system defaults for certain tools that I use the editor variable controls which text editor to
open for example if a tool needs to open a text editor it opens vim by default due to this being set the editor variable
is a standard so a bunch of tools know how to read from it we saw that before when I wrote a git commit message get new
to open vim due to this setting you can also choose to set your own variables here if you want I really really like this
pattern because it means your settings are stored in one spot you know if 10 different tools decided to open your
default text editor it means you only need to change this variable in one spot if you wanted to use something else next
up there's a bunch of configuration to use syntax highlighting in certain tools like less and man the man command opens
a reference manual for many different tools for example if you run man grep it'll open the manual for grep this is a
good way to learn about a specific tool you can also see their syntax highlighting without setting those environment
variables we just saw this would be all one solid color which in my opinion is a bit harder to read lastly this line
does the dollar sign zero trick we did before to see what shell we're running and even if we're running bash and we have
the bashrc file present it sources that file sourcing it basically means running the script and any shell-related
changes will take
effect in your current shell if you are running a z-shell or phish you would want to modify this for whatever shell
you're using next up let's take a look at the rc file for the sake of time I'm going to try to keep things brief rather
than go into the gory details of everything this file executes every time you start a new terminal session that means
every time you open a new terminal window or spawn a new tmx window this bashrc file is going to run top to bottom the
first five settings control your history basically if you want to save the last 50 000 lines of history ensure each line
has its own time stamp avoid adding duplicate or empty lines and also append to the history file instead of rewriting a
new file on every entry your history is saved in your home directory with bash it'll be in a bash underscore history
file mine is nearly empty now because prior to this talk I backed up my real history file so that I didn't have to worry
about showing sensitive information during the talk some of them contain client information about client work and I
didn't want to leak those out by accident speaking of history you can take a look at your history by running the history
command that's useful to find commands you've run in the past and with saving 50 000 entries chances are you'll be able
to find commands you've run months ago but dropping through this output would be kind of painful so bash provides the
control r keyboard shortcut to reverse search your bash history we'll go over that in more detail once we encounter a
different part of this bashrc file the next couple of settings are default values of the bashrc file it's not worth
spending any time on them but I included them here anyways although it is worth mentioning that on a Linux system you
can check out what the default rc file is by cutting out Etsy scale that dash rc that could come in handy if you're
tweaking your bash rc file and you want to double check the default value also in the scale directory there's a few
other default config files to look at if you're curious next up we have aliases and these are really really useful the
basic idea here is if an aliases file exists then we load it in there's two files here because my dot files are public
on GitHub and I wanted the option to have a local aliases file that's ignored from version control this locofile
contains aliases that are only ever going to be useful to me and are super specific to private files on my file system
like quickly accessing client project and things like that with that said let's take a look at the regular aliases file
which by the way in bash would be named bash underscore aliases by default I decided to go with aliases to make it a bit
more portable across different shells it still works as aliases because it's tied into the file being sourced from the
bashrc file we just looked at technically we can name this file anything we want as long as it matches up with what you
source the first couple of aliases are defined by default it's mainly for enabling colors in popular commands like ls
and grp but it also sets up popular aliases like ll I use this one all the time to list directories and files my real
aliases file has over 20 different functions and aliases and we could legit spend the next two hours going over it but
instead I want to focus on the big picture here in my aliases file you'll notice there's both functions and aliases and
they both allow you to access your function or alias as if it were a script on your system path if you plan to pass in
arguments like you see here then it would make sense to use a function otherwise you can set up an alias for example
with the weather command we can pass in a city zip code or nothing and it all works the same the dollar sign one ends up
being the value you passed in if it's empty then it's treated as an empty string but in this case we have an alias that
takes no arguments and we saw this command being run during the demo instead of just running the script on its own it
also sources the bachelor c file because it ends up changing the color of a specific tool that depends on bash being
reloaded that's kind of a neat trick because the alias and script both have the same name
in this case the alias takes precedence over the script's path the takeaway here is don't be afraid to create aliases
that help you in your day-to-day you should try to mold your dev environment to fit your exact needs I think there's
really a whole mindset or philosophy around that especially when it comes to using Linux with the amount of
configuration you can do it really becomes an os that you can customize for you one day I'll switch to native Linux and
the only reason I haven't already is because I had some audio trouble with some of my hardware I bet if I were running
native Linux for the last 10 years I would probably have 500 aliases and custom scripts to help me in my day-to-day
anyways that is it for aliases the next part of my the next part of my bashrc file is related to the prompt and we
haven't really gone over that yet so let's quickly do that before we see how it's configured my prompt doesn't look like
the bridge of the uss enterprise and this really comes down to personal preference I very much prefer a minimal prompt
that gets out of my way and lets me focus on the commands I'm running and the output of those commands but I do like to
see some information in my prompt for example as we saw earlier if you're in a git repo it will show the branch name
which I find to be quite handy beyond that I also like to see the current directory of where I am since that's important
information as well also if I ssh into one of my production servers I like to configure the prompt there to be read to
remind myself that I probably shouldn't copy paste commands from the internet here or start running a bunch of commands
without thinking I don't drink much but if I did seeing this red prompt would be a last resort reminder to hopefully
prevent myself from deleting a production database in a drunken rage one takeaway here is all of these command line
tools are super configurable if you don't like my basic prompt and you'd rather have a more busy prompt with emojis
rainbows and seeing your battery life or hard drive space on every line that's totally cool and you can do that I've
linked to a few resources in the get repo on projects that help you customize your prompt in different ways with that
said let's see how to configure your prompt aka your ps1 which stands for primary prompt string the syntax looks like
total insanity and it kinda is but there is a silver lining once you have it set up you never have to worry about it
again until you get bored and want to change things around we can spend an hour here easy but let's go after the low
hanging fruit the bash provides a bunch of special characters such as backslash u and slash h these are special
variables that translate to specific things in the case of slash u that's your username and slash h is the host of the
machine in my case my username is Nick and I named my computer kit if you're old enough to remember knight rider you'll
get that reference there's also this slash w hidden amongst a sea of backslashes that's the current working directory
which is slash temp in this case there's a number of other special variables that you can use too and a lot of them are
related to dates and times and I've dropped a link to the bash manual in the references if you want to check that out
now besides those special variables most of the other characters in this ps1 are related to outputting color these are
called antsy escape codes and it's kind of where the insanity begins it's not that it's a terrible system it's just that
it requires a lot of escaping and also resetting colors back to the default color if you've picked a different color
that's why you see a few zero zero entries that's the result code as for picking colors if you Google around for an ansi
color chart you'll find a bunch of examples I usually go to Wikipedia for it but that has too much to show in one slide
so I made a more readable chart here we can see a list of valid colors fg is foreground and bg is background if you
remember my username and host was green so that would be foreground color 32 and if you go back to the previous slide
here we can see 32 being set for the username and host we can also see that 34 are set for the working directory
which is blue that's the slash temp and if we jump back to the chart again here we can see that 34 is blue now there is
a variation of these colors called bright mode as far as I know there's more than one way to set them honestly a lot of
this stuff is black magic to me and I just copy paste things and tweak it until I'm happy but as for bright mode notice
how there is a zero one before the 32 and 34. to my knowledge that flips on bright mode for the color being set if you
set it to zero zero it would be the regular version of the color an alternative way to set that is to add 60 to the
value so 32 becomes 92 and 34 becomes 94. keep in mind not all terminals and themes are created equal so you may see
different results depending on what you use but here's a modified chart to show how bright colors look using xterm with
the default theme also my prompt only modifies the foreground color of text but you can set the background color too I'm
going to leave that one up to you if you want to research it you'll be able to find lots of copy-pastable examples if
you Google around as for the command separator it's pretty standard to end your prompt with a dollar sign this will end
up being the character that separates your prompt with whatever command you're running some folks like to use unicode
characters or an emoji years ago I used a lightning bolt but eventually grew bored of it but don't let me talk you out
of using something else I really do encourage you to mold your prompt and dev environment to whatever you like if you
did want to swap out the dollar sign it's a matter of replacing it here at the end as for this prompt the last component
is getting the get branch wedged in near the end the basic idea is we execute a function here and the output of that
function ends up in its place that function is defined in the middle here and all it does is grab the current branch
then it uses said to replace some characters that get usually outputs when you want to run the get branch command also
if the command fails we redirect all errors to dev null which means if we're not get repo we end up with no output which
is exactly what we want honestly it's not too important to go through this function in detail I'm pretty sure I grabbed
it from stack overflow like seven years ago and it still works great there's other more fancy integrations that you can
add too such as outputting specific characters depending on the state of staged files or if a file is different than
what's been commit but in practice I don't really find that to be that useful typically that information could be
obtained in your code editor or using get commands when you're ready to commit something but the branch is very nice to
see because being on the wrong branch can cause all sorts of confusion and typically you're launching vim or another
text editor while you're actively looking at your prompt so the branch is nice to see there OK so that's the prompt the
next bit here updates your terminals window title depending on which directory you're in this only works if your
terminal supports it and it's part of the default bashrc file so it's not super important to go over next up we have
asdf which is a tool that helps you manage programming language versions in a consistent way it's not important to cover
now since this mainly relates to installing specific programming languages although the vim plugin I use for previewing
Markdown files does require having node installed and I do use asdf to install node we'll talk more about this later
next up there's fcf which is a command line fuzzy finder we saw this in action during the demo when searching through a
project in vim as well as the command history this tool replaces the behavior for reverse searching your history and
makes it a lot better searching your history is an important part of using the command line so let's spend a minute or
two going over how to do this and how fcf improves the experience when you hit CTRL r in bash without fcf you'll get a
menu that looks like this the basic idea is you can start typing the first few characters of any command and it'll start
showing you matching commands you've run in the past
in this case I'm searching for the characters bs if there's multiple commands that start with these characters then you
can cycle through them by hitting control r as many times as you want it's called a reverse search because it returns
the last command that matches in other words it searches your history in reverse this is one of the most useful things
ever it sure beats hitting the up arrow 42 times in a row to find some command you ran three days ago I probably use
this feature 100 times a day you can pick the command you want to run by hitting enter and it'll populate the command
for you so in the above case all I did was hit CTRL r searched for the bs characters and then hit enter all in all
something like this takes a second or two to use it's really practical practical by the way you can also cancel your
reverse search by hitting CTRL c if you don't want to pick anything now when you use fcf control r is still available to
run except now it looks like this then as you start typing it narrows down the search in real time in this case only
commands that contain the c character are returned it's also a fuzzy search meaning if instead I searched for the l
character it would have found the second match since clear has an l in it it ranks then based on what it thinks is the
best match and it's very good I would say probably 99 of the time it picks the command they want after typing a few
characters and and that's even going through thousands of files in the one percent case where it fails it's no biggie I
just type one or two more characters and it always finds it after hitting enter to pick the item it'll inject the
command into your prompt and then you can choose to run it you can also hit control c to cancel the selection just like
the regular control r fcf can do a lot more than search your history too you can use it to search your process list and
more to be honest it deserves its own 45 minute talk it's a really really useful tool but now that we know how to search
our history efficiently let's go back to the bashrc file we saw these lines a few minutes ago this controls enabling and
configuring fcf the bottom line enables fcf and the two optional lines above it configure it fcf supports both dark and
light themes and you can also customize the colors however you see fit but the line above that is a bit more interesting
to talk about it configures fcf to use a tool called rip grep instead of the grep tool when it searches for matches rip
rep is a much faster version of grep although in practice I do use grep on the command line because it's fast enough but
fuzzy searching is pretty demanding and I find rip grip speed boost to be worth it it narrows down search results pretty
much as fast as you can type even with thousands of files this is important because the even plugin for fc up will use
rip rep when searching for files to open or searching your project for specific text during the demo I ran the rg
command which uses rip grip under the hood and fed the results into fcf using a vim plugin installing rickrep is easy
because every major operating system has a version of it in its package manager but I recommend holding off on
installing it right now because there's a couple of other tools covered in my rc file that we'll want to install and
it's going to be a lot easier to install them after we talk about dot files since that's all documented in one spot and
finally there's a bit of configuration in my bashrc file related to wsl2 and wsl1 this mainly sets up an x server
display so you can share your clipboard or run graphical apps between wsl and regular Windows I don't want to spend a
ton of time on this one but if you're using wsl the reference has a link to a video that goes over this in more detail
so that's how I have bash configured I know it was a lot to take in but we just condensed multiple months of research in
about 10 minutes or however long that took now before we get into using tmox I do want to cover one last thing that's
important when writing your own scripts when writing shell scripts you might have seen something like what we see here
this is called a shebang and it's the first line in the file that starts with pound exclamation point followed by a path
to some type of binary such as
sh bash or any programming runtime that can be called from the command line you may have also seen this style of a
shebang which technically works on most systems but it's considered to be less portable it's less portable because the
bash binary might not exist in slash bin on some systems whereas user bin env exists almost everywhere I tend to use
this style unless I made a mistake and use the less portable version by accident speaking of portability remember when
we talked about using sh instead of bash for scripting well the barn shell aka sh is posix compliant this is a standard
that was created to ensure compatibility between different operating systems to write a posix compliant shell script you
would reference sh instead of bash in practice I try to do that but sometimes you really need the extra features
provided by bash in which case I would use bash without giving it a second thought honestly we could spend two hours
going over the subtle differences between the two so let's just leave it at that you can always Google for the
differences later with that said I think one of the best ways to learn something is to see fully working examples so
I've dropped a bunch of links in the references to a number of scripts I've open sourced over the years to help me in my
day-to-day now I'm not saying it's the best code ever written but it might get your noodle cooking to see what types of
programs or problems you can solve on the command line all of the code is MIT licensed too so that's shells and
scripting in a nutshell on that note we covered a lot but don't feel compelled to learn everything upfront before you do
anything you can slowly introduce things on a need to know basis what I mean by that is like any programming language or
environment you can still be very productive without understanding the entire language and ecosystem in detail next up
let's go over using tmux unlike the shell we'll spend the majority of our time using tmox instead of configuring it but
we will take a look at some config settings too first up what is tmox good question I'm glad you asked tmux is a
terminal multiplexer and what that means is it lets you create and control multiple terminals from a single screen we
saw that before in the demo when creating Windows and splits it also lets you create sessions that you can attach and
detach from which is amazing because it means if you close your terminal everything will still be running in the
background and you can connect to it or connect to any session at any time and it'll just resume where you left off
before you'll find tmox in whatever package manager your operating system uses so it's going to be no problem to install
it but like before let's not worry about installing it until we talk about dot files near the end for now let's just
focus on using it one core feature of tmux is its ability to control most things with hotkeys but don't worry you can
usually use the mouse for a lot of things too like selecting text or copying text or clicking different Windows or split
panes but since tmox is so high key driven they introduce the idea of a thing called a prefix key the basic idea is
you'll hit this key along with some other key afterwards to perform a specific action this helps namespace all of your
tmx hotkeys so you don't end up overriding hotkeys from other tools by the way I also tend to call this a leader key
because that's what vim defines it as so you may hear me use both terms interchangeably by default it's bound to control
b which in my opinion is a bit funky to hit so I've remapped my prefix key to be the back tick that's usually under the
escape key or to the left of the one on a standard keyboard in practice you'll find a lot of folks use this key it's
pretty easy to access and you really type it in your day to day and when you do need to insert a backtick somewhere then
you can just hit the key twice it's not really a big deal throughout the rest of this section I'll always reference
hotkeys with the word prefix instead of using the backtick directly since you could in theory be using a different key
by default when you open a terminal tmox is not going to be running we need to run it manually by running the tmux
command after running it you'll know you're inside of tmux because you'll see a status bar on the bottom of your
terminal out of the box the status bar is going to look different than what we see here but we'll go over how to
configure that a bit later on I made mine pretty minimal to maximize usable space while giving me just enough
information I care about from here we have access to a bunch of tmox goodies for example if you hit prefix c you can
create a new window notice on the bottom we have two Windows now instead of one and both of them are named bash because
that's the shell I'm running so let's say we opened a couple of Windows like we see here and it starts to get confusing
because we're not sure what's running in each window well if you hit prefix comma tmux will bring up its command mode
and now we can rename the window by typing in whatever we want with a new name you can also switch to a different window
by hitting leader 2 or whatever number you want to switch to the window you're currently looking at will have a star
next to it which makes it easy to identify at a glance by default tmux will order Windows starting at zero but in my
tmux config I changed it to start at one because in my opinion it's a lot easier to hit backtick one rather than
backtick zero also if you have mouse mode enabled you can click any one of those Windows on the bottom to switch it and
yep I do have mouse mode enabled in my config can everyone read that yeah just kidding so as an aside I'm not trying to
cover every tmux feature here there's other ways to switch between Windows 2 but I'm trying to focus on what you might
use in your day-to-day tmux has this help menu that you can bring up with prefix question Mark to learn all about its
different binds and that's kind of what we see here the funny thing is I zoomed out to try to fit all of this in one
screenshot but there's still five lines above this there's also the man pages too and plenty of cheat sheets available
if you Google around with that said I included a link to a cheat sheet if you want to check that out in the references
so going back to our example before if you want to split a window in half you can use prefix b to open a split below you
but that's not the default bind instead I made it match the same bindings as my vim config and there's really no limit
to how many times you can split a window you're basically limited by your monitor screen resolution in practice I use
split panes all the time and you can switch between them using the mouse or if you use my tmx config you can also use
alt and the upper down arrow depending on which direction you want to go alternatively you can also split your Windows
vertically this time around you can use prefix v which also matches my vim keys binds or bim key bindings also while I'm
not showing it here you can combine horizontal and vertical splits together however you see fit you can even drag the
bar around with your mouse to resize the panes there's resize hotkeys for that too but personally I don't even know what
they are off the top of my head because I just don't use them at all next up if you do find yourself having a bunch of
splits open but you want to temporarily zoom into one of them without closing the rest of your splits then you can do
that with prefix z you can tell if you're zoomed in because it'll show a z next to the window name on the bottom this is
something I do all the time as well it's especially handy if you're creating tutorial videos with a large font size and
you just want to zoom into something to explain one window but I still do use this in my day to day with a regular font
size too now there's a lot more we can do with Windows and paints but this goes back to the 80 20 rule which is
basically focusing on the 80 which is going to give you the most benefits versus how much time you spend in other words
what we just covered goes a really really long ways for dealing with Windows and split panes next up let's go over
another killer feature of tmux which are sessions if you hit prefix d that is going to detach you from your current
session we didn't go over this yet but when we ran tmux before it started a session for us behind the scenes and it
named that session zero since we didn't define a name that means if we close our terminal we could reattach to it and
things will be back as if we never left if we ever forget what's running we can also use the tmux ls command
to get a list of sessions in our case we have just the one here then if we run the attach command along with a specific
session name we can attach to a specific session right now our session is named zero but we can choose to rename it to
something else which we'll do in a few it's also worth pointing out that if you run tmux attach with no arguments it'll
attach you to the last used session which is something I do all the time after running that attach command we're back to
our session from before and it's like we never left what's really useful is that you can have multiple sessions running
at once and switch between them at will that's a game changer if you have a terminal focused development environment
speaking of multiple sessions if you're already in a team up session you can create a new session by running prefix
colon to bring up command mode and then you can run the new session command I'm passing in a custom session name of cool
here but you can name it whatever you want technically you can make a new session without naming it but I find in
practice that naming your sessions is totally worth it especially when you're dealing with a few sessions as for this
animation right after the session is created we can see that we're put into a new session with only one window but our
old session is still running in the background also if you're curious most commands that you can run in command mode can
also be run directly on the command line although in this case if you try to create a new session like this when already
in a session tmox is going to prevent you from doing it by default otherwise it gets too confusing with nested sessions
however when you run new session in command mode that doesn't nest the new session with an existing session it creates a
completely new one I know that's a little confusing but that's how it works as far as I know the takeaway here is you
should always spawn new sessions from command mode if you're already inside a session or you can just detach from your
current session and make a new session from the command line as for switching between sessions you can hit prefix s this
gives you a list of all of your sessions and then you can use the arrow keys to pick the one that you want and switch to
it by hitting enter upon doing so you'll be put into that session immediately what's really cool is as you cycle through
the list of sessions you'll get to see a preview of what's running in the lower half of the window that could be very
handy to see what's running in a session you can even click directly into one of those boxes and jump straight into that
sessions window next up let's say you want to search up and down your buffer with the way I have things configured you
can use the mouse wheel to scroll up in your buffer and that puts you into tmox's copy mode you can identify that by the
orange label in the top right which shows the number of lines in the buffer then you can hit the forward slash key to
begin searching type in your term and hit enter from here tmux will highlight all the matches and you can press m n as a
Nick to jump to the next match or shift end to go in reverse this is what I meant by tmok super charging your terminal
suddenly we can do all of this with any terminal now with the way I have things configured if you select any text with
the mouse and let go with the mouse button it'll copy that text to your clipboard that's due to using a tmux plugin
called yank you can even use the mouse wheel or the page or up down keys to quickly select a bunch of text that is
multiple pages long copy pasting text is a pretty common thing to do so I'm sure you'll be using that one once in a
while I know I do next up it's worth pointing out that if you open two separate terminals you can connect both of them
to the same session when you do this your actions are going to be mirrored in both terminals that includes both typing
and switching Windows by default tmux will also resize the viewport of both terminals to be whatever the smaller one is
to be honest I am not sure why it does this by default but you can change this behavior for example if you attach to the
session like this along with setting one config option then you can connect to the same session but each terminal will
have its own independent view of a specific window this is very very handy if you use multiple monitors it means you can
have a second terminal open on your other monitor and look at a different window on the same session that's running on
your main monitor I do this quite often when I'm working on projects that require seeing many things at once lastly
let's say you're detached from tmux and you want to stop all of your sessions you can do that by running tmux kill
server that's going to completely kill tmux destroy all of your sessions and stop any processes that were running in the
foreground inside of tmox that could be handy if you get busy with not naming your sessions and after a few weeks of
using tmux without rebooting you wind up with having 20 unnamed sessions and 50 copies of him running been there done
that although as for rebooting by default you will lose all of your sessions after your reboot on Linux this might not
be too bad because you know you might not reboot for six months but on Windows this is painful because Windows will
reboot your machine whenever it feels like it but there is a silver lining there's a plugin called tmux resurrect that
will let you save and restore your sessions after a reboot even if the tmx server is killed with that said let's quickly
go over a few interesting parts of my tmox config for the sake of time we're not going to spend as much time as we did
going over the shell related configs my config is pretty well commented so it should be fairly easy for you to take a
look at it in more detail on your own like the other config files will show a little bit at a time and this is how you
can customize your prefix key there's not much to it if you wanted to use something other than the backtick then you
would change it here next up this one is super interesting this is the setting that allows you to get independent
Windows when connecting to the same session multiple times apparently resizing isn't enough you need to aggressively
resize to get your independence these settings control the status bar I explicitly removed everything except showing the
window number and labels by default tmx shows a clock on the bottom right side of the status bar I have that disabled
with comments if you Google around for tmok status bar configuration you'll find a bunch of examples on what you can do
for example you can add things like your network ip address and more that could be handy if you're connecting to
multiple remote machines these settings work together to make tmox a bit more human friendly for example if you had four
Windows and you closed window 2 then tmux by default will leave a numbered gap what I mean by that is you would end up
with Windows 1 3 and 4 being available the first setting removes the gaps so you would end up with Windows 1 2 and 3.
the other settings on the bottom make tmux start numbering Windows at 1 instead of 0. next up you can quickly reload
your tmux config by hitting prefix r that's handy to do if you're tweaking your tmux config and you want to see the
changes without having to kill your tmux server this is similar to sourcing your bashrc file to see the changes without
opening a new terminal lastly tmux has plugins and the tool to manage them is called tpm that stands for tmux plugin
manager in case you're wondering it's something you'll need to install and it's included in my dot files documentation
the yank plugin copies selected text to your clipboard and the resurrect plugin lets you save and restore tmok sessions
even if your tmux server dies you can do that by hitting prefix control s to save your sessions and prefix control r to
restore them once you're inside any existing tmx session and that's all you have to do this plugin is awesome especially
if you're on Windows now let's talk a little bit about them and unlike the tmx session this is going to be more like a
rapid-fire description of a bunch of vin plug-ins that I use in my day-to-day that's because to really really really get
into vim would totally require its own dedicated talk instead of a few minutes if you're curious I do have over 15
videos on YouTube covering a bunch of vim topics I've linked to them in the reference notes lastly I do run regular vim
not neovim but all the plugins that we're about to go over will work with vim 8.1 or above and neovim as well speaking
of plugins
we'll need to install a tool to use them then vim has many many different choices for how to install plugins since it's
been around for so long the one I use is called plug and you'll see how to install it once we get into the dot files
section none of these plugins are in any specific order but let's start with the ones that we've seen during this talk
also the code snippets you see here are straight from my vim config file as for fcf it allows us to fuzzy search files
git commits and more it's one of my favorite plugins fern allows you to quickly visualize your project's directory
structure and it makes it really easy to rename copy or delete files and directories it even supports bulk renaming
files and even buffer for doing complex renaming this could come in really handy if you want to re-reorganize how you
label media files or whatever you might be doing next up signify is a super efficient plugin for displaying get changes
like what we saw during the Markdown preview demo that's where we saw the orange exclamation point it also uses a green
plus symbol for new lines and a red dash for deleted lines then for previewing Markdown I use this plugin it's labeled
as being for neovim but it still works with the vim 8.1 or above this is the plugin that requires having node installed
also we saw this plug-in display Markdown that looks like GitHub styles but you can very easily change that by swapping
a CSS file in case you happen to be using gitlab bitbucket or you just want your Markdown style differently for csv
files there's not much to say about this one other than it works really well by the way I have about 20 other plugins
related to syntax highlighting for all the different tools and languages they use on a regular basis that's one of the
reasons why I really like vim it lets me use the same tool for everything multi-snips and vim snippets really help with
providing shortcuts for inserting code most editors have some type of snippet support and these work really nicely in
vim as for this other plugin it tells vim to automatically pop up its code complete window while you type now if you've
ever used sublime text that makes it very similar to how you can autocomplete anything you've typed in any open buffer
the cool thing about this one is none of these plugins require running a language server if you happen to know what that
is this is more for a lightweight approach to get useful but not hyper intelligent autocomplete that's context aware
moving on this one lets you zoom in and out of splits and vim just like you can with tmox this comes in very handy if
you're someone who likes to open a bunch of splits now all of these plugins work together to serve the end goal of
making it easier for you to find search and replace text I use these all the time especially the visual star and vim
gripper plugins there's a 30 minute video linked in the references that goes over how to do various find and replace
workflows in vim it ranges from searching for a character in one line to doing a regular expression based find and
replace across multiple files lastly there's two themes that I really enjoy using both of them have very good syntax
highlighting for many popular languages including Python and r I used one dark for all the screenshots in this talk and
I typically use it when recording videos and then I switch over to one light for personal use prior to that I used
drevbox for almost two years and I still really like that theme but like most developers we get bored of themes over
time so I like to mix it up but I could see myself switching back to it in the future besides plugin plugins related to
syntax highlighting there's still about 15 or so plugins that I didn't mention which are still worth using for very
specific things now I don't quite have 200 plugins but I would say I have about 45 or 50 and I do use them on a regular
basis I'm very protective of which plugins I add and I also focus on keeping things as efficient as possible that means
not using plugins that introduce typing delays or other hitches with that said all the plugins I use are listed in my
vmrc file in my dot files with a one line comment explaining which each one does and that's going to wrap things up for
vim so now let's talk a little bit about dot
files we've already seen a few such as the profile bashrc file and tmux config files when it comes to configuring user
settings for command line tools it is very common to put them into various dot files it's not a guaranteed role but most
command line tools will use files that begin with a dot for its configuration and there's three main places where they
might exist some tools will write out their config files into your user's home directory which is what we saw before
with a bashrc file tmux config and a few others it's also quite popular for tools to create a dot directory in your home
directory named after that tool for example if we take a look at my home directory there's a few tools that do that this
usually happens when a tool has one or more config file but not always sometimes a tool will place a bunch of config
files unrelated to its configuration along with its configuration all in one spot it's also pretty popular for tools to
place their config files within their own directory within the dot config directory inside of your home directory that's
a lot of directories this is a newer standard based on something called the xdg-based directory specification which is
linked to in the reference notes if you want to learn more about conventions around where certain files should live and
that's what we can see here if I happen to write any scripts that need one or more config files I always use the config
directory since it's a standard so that's how configuration is mainly handled but I sort of simplified where I store my
individual dot files to make the previous slides easier to read in reality most of my dot files are sim-linked to a
separate directory that's contained within a get repo you can see that here with the arrow pointer which is a sim link
sim links are references to another file or directory you can sort of think of them as shortcuts if you're coming from
the Windows world now they're not specific to dot files but they're often used together with that file so that you can
save your dat files in one centralized location and then sim link them to wherever they need to go in your home
directory and that leads us into one way of managing your dot files I'm a fan of having a single directory somewhere on
my system such as this dot files repo in my GitHub folder and then I can sim link the config files to where they need to
go this keeps things simple and it makes it easy to replicate my setup on another machine or share it with others all
you would have to do is clone down this repo and then set up the sim links if all you wanted to do is replicate my
configs but sim links are not the only way to manage your dot files there's dozens of tools focused on dot files
management but honestly I never felt the need to go that far a really popular one is called yet another dot files
manager and I've dropped a link to that one in the references it's basically an abstraction on top of git and it comes
with its own custom command line tool to manage your dat files if you find yourself gravitating towards wanting to use a
dot files manager I would start with this one I haven't used it personally but I do know someone who is happily using it
that someone has been working on the command line for 15 plus years and he looked at a lot of other tools so I trust his
recommendation with that said let's take a look at a few key parts of my dot files repo on GitHub in addition to the
config files themselves I included screenshots and documentation related to installing the tools I use on a few popular
Linux distros and Mac OS there's not really an unwritten rule to include installation instructions in your dot files
repo but I decided to go the extra mile I included them mainly because I have a few programming courses and I wanted a
single place where I could point folks too in case they wanted to replicate or cherry pick a few things for my setup for
example if you wanted to install tmux vim and another a number of other tools you could copy paste one of the package
installation commands depending on what os you're using in this case it's the debian and ubuntu installation
instructions but in the readme file there's copy pasteable commands for brew in case you're using Mac OS you can also
choose to add or remove anything you see fit for example jq is a command line tool that lets you parse json if you don't
care about that then you
can easily remove it then for installing the dot files themselves it's a matter of cloning this repo and then setting up
the sim links you could choose to grab all of my configs or just the ones that you care about for example if you find
yourself using z shell instead of bash you could remove my bashrc file or if you're not using wsl you can remove the
last sim link since that only applies to wsl also if you want more control over your setup and want a very personalized
solution you could always skim through my individual configs and copy paste whatever you want directly into your config
files beyond that there's a bunch of commands like this where you can pick and choose to install whatever tools you want
this quite a bit more than what's shown here but the rest are documented in the same way and all of these commands will
work on Linux and Mac OS since it's mainly running curl get and pip commands there's even reminders like this in the
readme file for installing plugins for vim and tmox there's also a section up top to help verify everything is set up
correctly lastly it's worth mentioning that these dot dot files are going to evolve over time in the references I've
linked to the exact commits for all the files that we went over but I do recommend checking out the master branch on
your own because if you're watching this talk in the future chances are I've updated a number of things which are
probably improvements in some way or another so that's the tldr on dot files if you Google around for fails GitHub
you'll find thousands of other examples I'm not sure how many of them will have tons of documentation but at least now
you're familiar with the concept and that's kind of the main takeaway of this talk I tried my best to showcase and go
over a bunch of tools but ultimately it's up to you to apply as much or as little as you want in your daily workflow
like anything that takes time to build up muscle memory especially for hitting hotkeys that might be foreign to you I
know it took me a long time to get used to them and I still feel like I have a lot to learn in other words don't get
discouraged if you struggle for a while it definitely gets better over time and on that note hopefully at the very least
a couple of unknown unknowns were discovered today usually when I watch a talk or read a book I'm hoping to walk away
with at least one nugget of information then I can apply it back to my day-to-day and that is all I have thanks a lot
for having me and if anyone is still awake and we still have some time I'm more than happy to answer any questions cue
awkward silence not really sure what I need to do beyond this point oh can you hear me now OK if anybody has any
questions please feel free to post in the chat or in the Q&A I want to thank Nick for his presentation yeah that was a
lot of great information I did have a question for you there are a number of different these are called vim is called
the terminal editor right there's a number of different ones what are your thoughts on some of the other ones OK by the
way this is a little bit weird you're actually coming through on headphones sitting on my desk instead of the one in my
ear so I can barely barely hear you but I'm pretty sure you asked me like how to compare different terminal emulators
like what's the difference between using next term and alacrity or kitty or like 50 other ones it really comes down to
preference right like tmux really helps you out when it comes to using different features like splitting Windows and
panes and searching so I just try to really go for the terminal that that is basically the fastest and the ones listed
in that other slide were kind of the ones that I prefer but you can always just Google around for you know like alacrity
versus kitty versus hyper or whatever terminal that you want and check out its features OK great
somebody asked is asking a question on check can we review the video if you're referring to this video yes I will post
it pretty soon on the Data Umbrella YouTube sorry to interrupt this is crazy like I can't hear you at all so I'm going
to switch over to different headphones OK yeah these are also a lot uglier and bigger I use these to edit my videos but
they work very nicely can you hear me now yeah much better OK all right yeah so reviewing the video the video will be
posted pretty soon and we'll send an announcement somebody else says I really enjoyed learning about tmux as an unknown
unknown thanks for the informative talk yes and actually you know I for tmux I wrote up a I have like a written up thing
that I did when I was taking the fastai deep learning best day deep learning course and so I can share that as well but
yeah tmux is very very it's really really useful I'd say yeah yeah it's one of those tools where it's like until you
realize that it exists like how to live live my life without that yeah it is I mean I'm gonna let me just see if I can
find it pretty quickly it was it certainly was very very popular yeah if anybody has any other questions feel free to
ask now while Nick is available and yeah yeah do you remember one question that popped up last time was like well let's
say I don't want to use vim like let's say I want to use vs code instead like is the command line still useful and like
totally for sure like vs code if you wanted to jump between different projects you can totally do that as a built-in
terminal like you know the real takeaway is just using the command line in general right it's not tied to specifically
using vim right OK that's great and I guess the other thing is maybe this is a good time to share your YouTube channel
do you want to share that in the link Nick ah I don't even have that chat open I can't even bring it up otherwise it's
going to like interfere with some things here but I can search YouTube is it yeah right if you just search for my name
it's there well I hope there might be other Nick gen attackers out there but no it's true you have 10 and a half
thousand subscribers is that right OK do you have a custom URL for your YouTube funny enough I don't remember it but I'm
pretty sure it's just YouTube.com c nicktoon attackers OK all right cool also if you went to my home page here then it's
in the about page on the bottom ah OK cool yeah there's a lot of a lot of helpful stuff there OK so if there are no
other questions I am going to we're going to complete the webinar once again thank you so much return no problem yeah
also one heads up about that YouTube channel there is a vim and tmux playlist so if all you care about is that then I
would check that out ah wonderful cool all right thank you yeah no problem